


this hour i tell things in confidence

by mooosicaldreamz



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Buffy AU, F/F, a lot of blood and blood drinking references, also a lot of zingers, you know how it be
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-02
Updated: 2019-05-02
Packaged: 2020-02-15 22:16:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 30,756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18678418
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mooosicaldreamz/pseuds/mooosicaldreamz
Summary: “There are other other Hellmouths,” Lena repeats. “Chile, France, Japan, Norway…”Even though it’s an offer of freedom, Kara hears it more as a signing of her fate. Midvale is what there is, now. She might’ve thought once she’d see something outside it, but her life is tied into the fabric of the town. There’s no going back now. There never was.Kara Danvers moves to Midvale, finds out it's a Hellmouth, falls in love, and dies. And then she lives.OR, the Buffy AU.





	this hour i tell things in confidence

**Author's Note:**

> Obviously, once I realized Kara Danvers and Lena Luthor translated exceedingly well to Buffy and Angel, I never stood a chance. Shoutout to [lynnearlington](https://lynnearlington.tumblr.com/) for being my baeta and for telling me repeatedly to add more depth to this. Additional shoutout to Walt Whitman for giving me a title and a through line on which to hang my hat. If you're into that sort of thing, there is a [playlist](https://open.spotify.com/user/mooosicaldreamz/playlist/1zOcJB27pF21Su4LIj2QHE?si=G_-GxRfnT0if9D5UO2CrMg) for this fic.

Into every generation there is born a slayer, a girl with the power to hold back the baddest of dudes. Her job is to protect the Hellmouths, hinky points around the world where the veil between Hell and earth have gotten a little thinner. It’s a busy, thankless job, and honestly? Despite being an ancient power given only to the strongest of women, it’s a shitty deal. You can’t go see the new _Scream_ movie when a giant worm is destroying the town’s movie theatre for the fourth time and you have to kill it _or else._

_-_

Kara Danvers didn’t used to have a problem with that. Sure, she burnt down her old school’s gym when it got packed with a whole coven of crazy evil vamps, and sure, she’s had some weird incidents at this new school. And sure, the school librarian seems to think that he can help coach her to her Slayer-y destiny, but like. Whatever. She makes exactly two friends and her sister likes her lately, and that’s enough in the face of all that other nonsense.

-

Kara sees the girl for the very first time in an alleyway a few feet away from the entrance to the local eighteen and up club, which is mysteriously, ominously named Alien Bar. Her new friends, Winn and James, claim it is the hottest spot in town. Alex has gone and found a friend to dance with named Maggie, and Kara can just _feel_ something tingling in the base of her neck.

When she steps outside, it’s dark, quiet, warm. And there’s a girl leaning up against the wall, the greenish glow of the Alien Bar sign casting over her. She looks almost ghoulish, on account of her skin being a pale white, her hair long and dark framing her face. She’s wearing a black jacket with an asymmetrical zip, black boots, black jeans. Kara stops short right in the entryway, and when she does, the girl’s head turns and her eyes attach to Kara sort of like a harpoon attaching into a whale’s blubber. For half a second, all thought escapes her.

For her part, the girl is watching her too, her eyes wide and - maybe a dark color, Kara can’t tell without getting closer. She looks around the same age as Kara, maybe a little older, just judging by the fashion sensibilities. But she looks almost stunned.

And then she turns and walks away.

Kara follows her slowly, knowing that she’s being an absolute creepazoid, but when the girl turns into the alley adjoining Alien Bar to whatever weird industrial building is next door, Kara keeps on. She’s forced to pull up short when the girl turns around abruptly halfway down the alley.

“Is there a reason you’re following me?” the girl asks. The tone says irritation but she sounds somewhat amused, really, her face twitching like she might break into a smile. Kara wants to see it. Can feel a subconscious and burning attraction right in her chest.

“Is there a reason you’re going down a dead end alley?” Kara asks, gesturing down to the brick wall at the end of their road, her hand passing within inches of the girl. The girl doesn’t bother to turn around and look, just crosses her arms and adopts a stance that must intimidate others. But Kara has only just recently burnt down her old high school’s gym in an attempt to kill a massive group of vampires, so. Kara puts her hands on her hips and stands tall, aware of how if this woman took her boots off, Kara’d be at least three inches taller than her. All the same, they’re at face level.

“I have my reasons,” the girl says. “You should go back inside. The Harvest starts soon.”

“Does everyone in this town drink enigma juice?” Kara asks, and the girl is coming toward her clearly intent on brushing past her. So she reaches out and grabs her by the arm, gripping tight, and the girl goes stock still. They end up at an impasse, turned sideways in the alley. “What’s the Harvest?”

“I’m sure you can read about it in a book somewhere,” the girl says, and now Kara thinks that the almost-smile expression on her face _is_ her smile, because it’s quirked the very top corner of her lip up. Up close, her face is more gorgeous than ever, her eyes green and focused on Kara. “Let go.”

“I know we’re only just getting to know each other, but I don’t deal well with cryptic warnings,” Kara says. “Not my jam. If you’ve got something to say, say it.”

The girl looks at her for a second, her eyes tracing all over Kara’s face. For a second, it seems like Kara will get nothing, but then, her face softens and her mouth drops open.

“I look forward to getting to know you better, then,” she says, voice velvet soft and low, and Kara is so shocked by the hot thrum that drums up in her stomach that she drops ahold of the girl’s arm. She doesn’t move away immediately, either, her eyes trained on Kara’s, their bodies close in the alleyway. When she slips out of Kara’s orbit, it’s slow, halting almost, like she’s loathe to do it. Kara feels her like she’s a driftaway debris from her own body. Like the moon fresh free from the Earth.

“Who are you?” Kara asks, turning to watch the girl go. She’s disappearing from the hazy lighting of the alleyway and into the darkness. The girl looks at her, eyes still wide and focused, like she’s got into some coke or something.

“A friend,” she says. Kara huffs, rolling her eyes. 

“Maybe I don’t want a friend,” Kara returns. The girl’s half-smile tilts into a real smile then, teeth gleaming in what’s left of the light.

“I’ll see you around,” she says, and then she’s gone.

That’s about when the screaming starts inside.

-

She goes on accepting her destiny or whatever. J’onn, the oldie librarian with the deep voice and the too-many-books, tells her he’s her Watcher, destined to help the Slayer with her slayering activities. Alex tries to tell her that it’s too dangerous, and then Kara beheads a vampire right in front of her, and then Winn and James find out when they walk into the library to find Kara and Alex whittling stakes while J’onn shows off a crystalized demon heart.

“Now that we’ve foiled the Harvest, we’ve got to get ahead on finding the Master,” J’onn says, pacing slowly back and forth in front of the assembled group of four. “He’s far too dangerous to be left alone.”

“Just to be clear, the Master is like, a granddaddy vampire, right?” Winn asks, raising his hand like he’s in school. Which he is. He’s a funny boy, short and with hair that he’s let grow a little too much. “And he’s bad.”

“Vampires are soulless and therefore largely incapable of good,” J’onn says, sighing as though he’s gone over this a thousand times before. It’s only the third time, but he seems prone to dramatics, as far as Kara can tell. “Literally soulless - the process of vampirification leeches them of their souls and humanity. Their only driving force is a greed for power, and blood.”

“Cool,” Winn says, nodding. “I mean, not cool. Evil is bad.”

“The Master is one of the Old Ones, vampires who have lived long enough to accrue power that younger vampires do not have. He has been trapped underneath the Hellmouth for the past two hundred years, and now, he seeks to rise again,” J’onn says, like he’s on a Shakespearean stage. Alex is practicing stabbing motions over in the corner of the room.

“Hellmouth,” Winn says. “Yep. Okay.”

“There are mouths to Hell placed across the globe, magnets for supernatural activity where the barriers between the dimension of reality and Hell are weak. The one here, in Midvale, is sealed by a symbol of Argo.”

“Yes. For sure,” Winn says.

“The Prophecy of the Slayer determines that the task of preventing that barrier from breaking completely falls to a girl imbued with supernatural strength, capable of fighting the agents of chaos that surround and seek the Hellmouth,” J’onn says.

“I think I’ve got it,” Winn says. “Thanks for the exposition.”

“Now,” J’onn says, wheeling over a whiteboard that he’s had stashed in the corner, covered in a mass of text that is not all plain English. “Let’s begin.”

“Hold up, I’m ordering a pizza first,” Kara says, slipping off her seat on the table and rushing for the phone.

-

“Sensing vampires is one of the most important skills you can develop as a Slayer,” J’onn says, sipping his Shirley Temple and eyeing the pulse of teenagers and college students around them. She’s not all too concerned with being seen with the school librarian, but the bartender had for sure given J’onn a look like he might pull a shotgun on him.

“I can sense them just fine,” Kara says. “That guy right there is one.”

“Why do you say that?” J’onn asks, sounding mostly exhausted. But Kara is really trying, really trying to pass her Spanish class and learn how to be a Slayer. He could give her a little more of the benefit of the doubt. She eyes the man she’s just pointed out.

“He’s wearing bell bottoms,” Kara says. “And he looks all murdery.”

J’onn sighs, taking a longer sip of his drink. Out of the corner of her eye, Kara sees the shadowy figure of the Girl, still in all-black, different coat - this one is longer, down to her knees, but tailored well so that she doesn’t look like a creepy beachside watch peddler who might flash you. When she crosses into Kara’s full vision, she’s looking at Kara from across the room, eyes still so intense. Her hair is wavy, brushed down her shoulders, her hands in her pockets.

“No, Kara,” J’onn says. “Tap into your senses. The eldest and smartest of vampires will be indistinguishable from humans. But you as a Slayer are gifted with the tools that I am not.”

The look on the Girl’s face isn’t anything in particular but contemplative, her face clear of any true expression as she watches Kara, moving toward a set of stairs that lead to the upper levels of Alien Bar. J’onn is still monologuing.

“It’s been described as a tingle on your spine, a sort of - awareness of their presence, unpleasant and overwhelming in your psyche,” J’onn says. “Can you sense it?”

Kara’s eyes pass by the definitely icky taste on her tongue - that dude in the bell bottoms is _for sure_ a vampire - to the image of the Girl on the next level up, leaning on the railing and looking down at Kara, her hands free from her jacket now. She’s fiddling with a ring on her hand, the gold color of it catching the lights. Kara is standing up before she can even manufacture a reason to be standing.

“Did you sense something?” J’onn asks, excitedly. Kara shakes her head, because what she’s sensing right now is worlds away from what he’s describing.

-

“You’re lurking in graveyards now?” Kara asks. The Girl has tried to sneak up on her, but Kara can feel her eyes like an itch. She’s settled against a tree looking over a fresh grave that J’onn claims will spawn a vampire at any moment. She’s got a bottle of holy water, four stakes, and a silver cross the size of a dinner plate, so she’s pretty sure she’s got a handle on things. What she does not have a handle on is Walt Whitman, whom she’s been trying to read in between staring for long stretches at the unmoving earth in front of her.

“Just getting some fresh air,” the Girl says, her footsteps closer and closer until she’s leaning up against the gravestone nearest the tree.

“Are you always this suspicious?” Kara asks. The Girl is wearing that knee length coat again, a black t-shirt bunching underneath it.

“I practice,” the Girl says, her not-smile on her lips. “The Master is frustrated by you.”

“Glad to hear it,” Kara says. “Tell him I think he’s ugly too.”

“You shouldn’t underestimate him,” the Girl says, and Kara sighs, looking up from her book and glaring. She adjusts her glasses on her face, squinting at the image of the girl in front of her.

“Can you sit down if you’re going to be all vague? I’m trying to read,” Kara says. 

It seems like this has the Girl hesitating, her body freezing for a minute second. But she unwinds anyway, settling on the ground against the gravestone, her shoes crackling a few leaves as she sits down. Kara is honestly surprised; she was pretty sure the Girl was going to return with another warning about some tragic supernatural event sure to ruin her week. But this is nice too.

“What is it you’re trying to read?” the Girl asks. Kara can’t help but laugh.

“No small talk until you tell me your name,” Kara says.

“Do names matter much to you?” the Girl asks, her voice quiet and contemplative and distracting. Kara looks from her book again to her.

“It’s just so I don’t go around calling you creepy stalker girl,” Kara says. “Here, let me show you. My name’s Kara, I just moved here.”

She extends her hand between them, ready to shake. The Girl looks at her and her hand for a long few moments, way too weighty to just be normal. But she reaches out anyway, like she’s getting tugged along by wires. Their hands slide together and the Girl’s hand is cold, but the feeling raising up Kara’s arm is warm, heady, buzzy - all the hairs on her arm stand up like an electric shock’s gone through them. The Girl looks at her like she’s surprised by it too, her fingers tightening around Kara’s hand.

“Lena,” the Girl says, her voice cracking. “I’ve been here a while.”

Their hands are still clasped together, like they’ve gone and got super glue stuck to their palms. Kara has to think hard to get her muscles to disengage. When her hand drops to her lap again, it looks normal.

“I’ve got to write an explication on “Song of Myself”,” Kara says, holding up her book. Lena’s hand is flexing in her lap before she it slips back into her jacket pocket.

“Ah, Walt,” Lena says, like she knew him personally. “This hour I tell things in confidence. I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you.”

Kara pauses, feeling something like a cold finger move down her spine.

“Are you doing riddles now?” Kara asks.

“That was from the poem, actually,” Lena says, a smile appearing on her face.

“Cool party trick,” Kara says, feeling a grin on her face, letting her book drop closed as she shifts to look more fully at Lena. Lena. It’s a good name. “You impress a lot of girls with that?”

The moment goes fractious then, Lena’s smile freezing in place as she looks like a movie on pause. That is, of course, when the vampire she’s meant to be waiting for starts digging his way out of the dirt in front of them. Kara springs up, and so does Lena, and it barely takes a minute - Lena holds the vamp by the neck long enough for Kara to stake him, and he dusts right there between them.

-

The thing about Midvale is that things never go really right. James gets turned into a baby. Alex gets kidnapped by their chemistry teacher, because he turns out to be a part of a cult whose main deal is sacrificing virgins. There’s a whole laundry list of stuff, vampires sent by the Master and random witches showing up and putting all the adults in town to sleep for a day.

Lena kisses her. Kara is pretty sure that’s how it happens. Lena is in her bedroom, because they get chased all through town by a clown car’s worth of the Master’s vamps, and of course, her house is safe - J’onn keeps going on and on about how homes are safest from vampires unless they get invited - so they go in there, Kara hissing a quick, “Get the fuck in here,” and Lena kisses her after they spring upstairs and the world quiets down on Kara’s bedroom door closing.

For one singular moment, Kara forgets it all. How she can’t figure out what the fuck valence electrons are for longer than one class period at a time, how Alex keeps having nightmares, how J’onn has her going on five am runs. They kiss each other, maybe. And the world goes away.

But things never really go right in Midvale. Kara presses Lena against her bedroom door and feels, acutely, a prick like a needle on her lips, and blood seeps into the kiss.

She’s got problems. Capital P.

-

“You feel like explaining yourself?” Kara asks, a few nights later. She’s used just about every inch of her brain to track Lena down to a massive mausoleum on one end of the graveyard that she’s always tended to avoid. When she had arrived, she could just _feel_ Lena somewhere nearby. Now it makes sense. God, she’s been such an idiot. J’onn never needs to know about her complete lack of awareness in the face of a very, very pretty girl.

Lena, for her part, is sitting on the floor of the stone room, moonlight streaming in above her head. She’s stripped off her coat for once, tossed to the side. One of the stone effigies of an angel in the mausoleum has been thrown and shattered.

“You should leave,” Lena says. She’s just sitting there, eyes closed, like she’s trying to meditate or something. “The Master’s Vessel is looking for you.”

“How am I supposed to know that you aren’t the Vessel? That you haven’t been playing me this whole time?” Kara asks, her stake clenched tight in her hand. She can see the wince on Lena’s face clear as day.

“Maybe I have been,” Lena says. Her hands are in her lap, the fingers of her left hand flipping the ring on her right around and around. It gleams brightly. Kara sighs, dropping down to the floor in front of her. Lena’s eyes pop open then, her mouth dropping open as she looks at Kara. “You should leave.”

“You could’ve killed me six times over by now,” Kara says. “I know I’m not that smart, but I also know that whatever you are, you’re not bad.”

Lena’s face twists, her eyes looking up from Kara to the ceiling.

“I’m plenty bad,” Lena says. “This was a mistake.”

Kara feels the heavy weight of disappointment in her stomach, the sludgy feeling of rejection, but she pushes through it. Lena looks like she needs - help, maybe. She can do that. She can be that.

“What are you?” Kara asks. Lena sighs, her eyes connecting with Kara’s, solid, warm.

“A vampire,” Lena says.

“But not a normal one,” Kara says. “I can tell that much. You don’t - I don’t sense you that way.”

Lena frowns. When it seems like she won’t get a response, Kara kicks out, just barely, until her shoe catches Lena’s.

“What was it you said? This time I say things in secret,” Kara says. Lena frowns even deeper.

“This hour I tell things in confidence,” Lena says.

“I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you,” Kara finishes, a grin on her face all of a sudden as she sits on the dusty floor of a mausoleum which is in serious disrepair. What was it with this place? “I trust you.”

“You shouldn’t,” Lena says. Kara shrugs.

“This whole Slayer thing is all about instincts,” Kara says. “So I’m going with my gut.”

Lena looks at her then, her eyes so green and deep and focused, her brows twisted into something like confusion and appraisal. Kara does her very best to stand up to the questioning, and she can feel the moment Lena relents, just the slightest, like a lock slipping into place.

-

“She’s got a soul. I guess she was cursed with it by a bunch of druids, which I didn’t know you could even do, thanks for that. But,” Kara says. J’onn is blinking at her as though she’s gone and clubbed herself repeatedly over the head just for his entertainment. Alex is pacing back and forth so fast that Kara thinks that she might be developing some sort of superspeed. The library is very quiet all around them. “I trust her.”

“You trust her,” J’onn deadpans, his arms crossed. “You trust a vampire who claims she has a soul to help us defeat one of the eldest vampires on the planet.”

“Yep,” Kara says. Alex groans, very loudly. “She trusts me, too, J’onn - she told me when she was changed, where she’s from, her like, old name. She wants to help.”

“When were you so busy making friends with this vampire?” Alex asks, mostly yells.

“I didn’t realize she was a vampire at first,” Kara admits, and J’onn actually raises his hands to the sky like he’s inviting God to go ahead and strike him down. “And she’s around sometimes when I patrol! It’s not that weird.”

“Kara! It’s super weird,” Alex says. She stops in the middle of her pacing and focuses closer on Kara. “Is she hot?”

“What?” Kara asks, and she can actually feel her face get hot. Thankfully she’s saved from answering when J’onn raises his hand in annoyance at Alex.

“Don’t be preposterous,” he says. “She told you her true name?”

“Yeah,” Kara says. “Kieran.”

She watches as his face goes blank, his mouth dropping open.

-

As it turns out, Lena is a notable modern vampire in that she was a pretty murderous one. She and her brother blazed a trail across the globe for a hundred years, before Lena disappeared and Lex went on his own way. J’onn says on no uncertain terms that association with Kieran - he insists on saying Kieran in a hissing tone every time - is dangerous. But Kara doesn’t much care. Lena helps her. With her homework, sometimes, or with patrol, or when it’s the anniversary of her parents’ death and she doesn’t want to talk to Alex, Lena finds her on the swingset in the park next to the graveyard and sits with her in silence.

And Kara thinks about kissing her, way too much.

“The Master is strong,” Lena says, giving a half-hearted swing in Kara’s direction. They’re sparring, because it’s boring tonight. Alex had been out on patrol with her for about an hour before she had gone home yawning, and then Lena had shown up with a bag of donut holes for Kara.

“Yeah, I know,” Kara says, going for a kick to the ribs that Lena catches, holding her leg up for a second in the air, forcing Kara to hop. When she lets go, Kara almost hits the deck, huffing.

“He won’t play games with you,” Lena says. “He just wants your blood.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Kara says. “A Slayer’s blood is special, I know.”

She swings her fist suddenly, and catches Lena by surprise on the jaw. Lena is a strong vampire too, old enough to have gained fighting skill and extra special strength. Lena takes the hit admirably, her body stumbling for one small second before she settles back into stance, a smirk that sends Kara’s stomach into veritable flames on her lips.

“Very special,” Lena says. “It’s the most delicious blood there is. But the Master wants it for your power.”

Lena catches Kara’s wrist as it retreats from the punch, pulling her into her body and catching her other wrist before she can break free. All of a sudden, Kara’s back is up against Lena’s front, her neck tilted sideways as Lena’s breath rolls across it. Shit and fuck, honestly.

“And you are very powerful,” Lena says, her voice somehow soft even in this training montage moment. Her grip isn’t quite as strong as it could be, and Kara takes advantage, turning in her arms and getting her leg around one of Lena’s, kicking back until Lena’s on one leg, and falling backwards under Kara’s body weight. Kara doesn’t have a stake - had set it aside even when Lena had insisted it would be fine - but her hand presses tight to the center of Lena’s chest, over her heart and sternum.

“Thank you,” Kara says, breathing hard. It’s undeniable the way Lena’s eyes drop to Kara’s lips. Kara wonders if she mistakes the peak of white fang that seems like it appears in Lena’s mouth.

“Kara,” Lena starts, her voice halting, body squirming underneath Kara’s. Kara takes the hint, scrambling off and away. She holds out her hand to help Lena up, and after a long moment, Lena takes it.

-

The Master kills her. Turns out, he’s destined to. It seems like the dumbest thing, prophecies and whatever determining her whole life. She fails her algebra two final in the morning, and dies that night.

She dies in what amounts to a puddle. It’s maybe a few inches deep, but she bleeds out and drowns and all kinds of dies. She dies and the Slayer is dead, and the Master is risen, until she lives. Winn does CPR and she’s gasping back to life, coughing up so much water it feels like she must be made of it. And she kills the Master. She lives and she lives. She’s always doing that.

Things go a bit dark after that, if you weren’t thinking they were dark before.

-

Sometimes it feels like there’s still water in her lungs, that the Master’s teeth are still dug deep into her neck. Kara had never really had the attention span to listen to J’onn’s lectures about the rules of vampire bites, how they can make you like it. The Master’s teeth had bit into her and _burned,_ and she had felt every cell get pulled from her like pulling glass from a deep wound.

She’s contemplating this one night, sitting atop the big mausoleum on the east end of the cemetery and shoveling Cheetos into her mouth, when she sees Lena.

“How goes your night, Slayer?” Lena asks, leaning up against a gravestone and looking upward. The truth is that even the biggest of the bads have been taking a vacation since the whole Master business. Kara goes out on patrols every night and only finds Lena.

“It’s been a waste,” Kara says, shrugging and looking down at Lena, in that familiar knee-length coat, hands tucked deep into pockets. “But it’s better than being at home.”

“Mrs. Danvers?” Lena asks, still leant up against the gravestone. In the moonlight, her skin is so white that it almost glows. Kara imagines, for a second, the kind of tone it might take in the sun. But that’s impossible. A lot of things are.

“Alex,” Kara says, sighing. “She thinks I’m not doing well with the whole dying thing.”

Lena cocks her head to the side for a moment, before she laughs a little.

“When I died, I went on a murderous rampage that lasted a hundred years,” Lena says, her shoulders slowly rising and falling in a shrug. “You’re doing alright in my book.”

“I’ll tell her that next time she suggests I stay the night in and let her come out for patrol in my place,” Kara says. Lena isn’t quite smiling, but it’s that small mouth quirk that comes close to it. Kara remembers what it was like to be dead, dying, feeling the strength drain out of her and feeling oh so frail when she hit the pool of water. And it’s nice when Alex makes her an extra few bacon pieces, and it’s nice when Winn comes over and plays N64 with her. But Lena never looks at her like she saw her dead.

“You alright?” Lena asks, her voice softer.

“Yeah,” Kara says, looking down at Lena and feeling her swinging feet come to a stop. “I’m alright.”

-

She has dreams. About dying.

She dreams about dying in more ways than just the Master, too. There’s the whole trying to breathe underwater thing for sure, the echoes of his laughter shifting through the water around her head. But there’s a man with wild dark hair throwing her off a roof. And plunging into a cold, freezing blue portal. And an axe splitting her in half. And a man stringing her up from the ceiling, splitting her stomach open. Lena’s lips on her neck turning to her teeth in her neck, burning her. J’onn says that as she grows into her powers, her senses will deepen to accommodate the past and future lives of Slayers, that she’ll dream memories that are hers and not hers. It seems an awful sort of course, this Slayer business.

Every few nights, she wakes up thinking she’s choking, rolling over to cough and expecting water to come out of her lungs. A few times she coughs so much she ends up puking, Alex running her hands through Kara’s hair.

Some nights, she just goes and sits on the front porch, careful to keep quiet. From there, she can see the cul-de-sac before her, rabbits flitting about on the lawn, cars driving by softly. The air is warm and breezy, so different than the oppressiveness of water.

“Do you dream?” she asks Lena one night. She’s leaning against the bannister that wraps around the porch, her back to the street. She had appeared almost at the exact time that Kara had stepped outside, her bike slowly idling to a stop a few houses down. Like it was meant to be that way.

“Yes,” Lena says. They don’t have the porch lights on, but Kara can sort of see Lena’s eyes.

“I have these visions,” Kara says, soft. The bubble of them around her is calming, good, even. She had woken up an hour ago trying to breathe, feeling like there wasn’t enough air in the whole world. “Or nightmares. I don’t know.”

“What can I do?” Lena asks, her arms crossed tight. Kara wants, more than anything, to press herself into Lena’s arms and feel the warmth she had felt so briefly when they kissed. But it’s apparent by now that there are boundaries between them that can’t be crossed, set by Lena and the world at large.

“I don’t know, distract me,” Kara says. “What does your ring mean?”

Lena glances down at her right hand then, clearly not expecting the question.

“It’s a claddagh ring,” she says. Her pronunciation picks up from some other accent, the one that Kara can hear sometimes hovering behind her words. “It’s an Irish tradition from a town near where I’m from.”

Lena comes closer, the gleam of the ring present under the streetlights drifting into the porch. She extends her hand, just out of Kara’s reach so that she can see it. There’s hands, a crown, a heart with its point oriented toward Lena’s wrist.

“My - father gave me one when I turned sixteen,” Lena says. It comes out as though she hasn’t told this story in hundreds of years. Kara imagines she hasn’t. “I got rid of it when I was turned, but after - after I got the soul, I suddenly wanted it back.”

“Does it mean something?” Kara asks, her eyes tired as she traces the rounding of the symbols and then the lines of Lena’s hands, caught in the air between them.

“The hands represent friendship, the crown loyalty, and the heart means love. As you’d imagine, I suppose,” Lena says, pulling her hand back and fidgeting with the ring, spinning it on her hand. “It’s used as a sort of. Relationship marker, I guess. Depending on which way you turn it, which hand you wear it on. It’s maybe an odd tradition, but…”

“I like it,” Kara says, softly. “I’m glad that you have something that reminds you of home.”

Lena’s eyes are soft and warm on her face, even in the darkness.

“Me too,” Lena says.

-

She died, but before that, she had kissed Lena. In fact, before she had felt all thought drift out of her, water leaking through her lungs, she had considered the great irony of it. A slayer, a vampire. Could it be any more obvious?

Sometimes she thinks about it. She tries not to, because it had turned into a whole debacle, but she does think about it. How Lena’s lips had felt against her, her hands on Kara’s arms before Lena had vamped out mid-kiss. How it had felt like _something,_ something more real than anything.

“How do you pay for this place?” Kara asks, reclined as she is on the front step of a tiny walk-up above the creepy print shop across town. She’s never seen anyone inside. Maybe she should look into that, scare something spooky up. It’s better than any boredom brought on by this interminable, post-death summer.

Lena, who’s stopped a few feet short of Kara on the sidewalk, looks curiously back at her.

“How did you find it?” Lena asks. Kara shrugs.

“Homing beacon,” Kara says. Lena continues on looking at her, her mouth beginning to quirk. Kara sighs, rolls her head on her neck.

“J’onn has me working on my vampiric senses, plus you’re always sauntering off this way after a night out,” Kara says. “Can I come in?”

“We could go somewhere else,” Lena suggests, her body language still and quiet. It’s true that J’onn has Kara working on sniffing the baddies. But Lena doesn’t smell anywhere near as awful as any vampire Kara has encountered - she doesn’t make Kara’s skin feel like it’s sloughing off, either. The newest of the new vamps smell like rest stop bathrooms. But Lena is something soft, like lake water.

“I’d rather not,” Kara says, reaching for the bag of stuff she’d bought at CVS on the way over. “I brought Oreos.”

“I don’t eat,” Lena says, though she eyes the Oreos in Kara’s hands anyway. “Shouldn’t you be patrolling?”

“The cemetery is a mere three blocks from your apartment,” Kara says. “My Spidey senses tingle when darkness rises.”

“The darkness is standing right in front of you,” Lena says, deadpan, in that _oh, I’m the worst vampire you ever did see_ voice. Kara blinks up at her.

“Can I come in?” she tries again. Lena’s body melts a little in her posture, until she looks a little more normal. When their eyes connect again, the look in Lena’s eyes is beseeching.

“I don’t think it’d be wise,” Lena says. It’s strained, and awful sounding in Kara’s ears. Not just for its content. It has her standing up suddenly, dropping her Oreos back into her bag.

“Then let’s go somewhere else,” Kara says. Lena draws herself up again, her hands deep in her pockets. Somewhere in Kara, there’s an urge to reach into the pocket and wind their fingers together. She can count on one hand the times they’ve touched before, briefly, wondrously. Kara had wound her fingers into Lena’s hair and their lips had touched and for an amazing ten seconds it was like there was no Slayer and there was just something hot inside her begging to be let out.

“Wherever you’d like,” Lena says, allowing Kara to lead the way. Kara doesn’t reach into her pocket, in the end. Lena’s hands don’t make it out of them either.

-

Her friends are trying to be cool about it. The whole dying thing.

“And then, our tank just wailed on him, and our healer went AFK so I had to backup heal,” Winn says, his hands waving in the air as he explains his epic adventures. James, sprawled in the seat next to him, is nodding along as though he’s heard the story before. “Afterwards, the guildmaster sent me a bunch of gold as thank you.”

“Awesome,” Kara says. They’re at Alien Bar, as they find themselves every few nights. During the school year, there was always trouble being scared up, vamps or demons running amok. Now it’s just hormones, kids home from college separating themselves from the high schoolers drinking Sprite, eyeing each other from across the dance floor. It’s boring. Who would have thought Midvale could ever be boring?

“I had a lady throw an ice cream cone in my face today,” James says. She can tell they’re just being cool about it, just trying to engage her in conversation.

“What a waste of ice cream,” Kara says, turning her eyes from the band on stage to James, feeling a smile climb onto her face. They’re both looking at her with unabashed worry, so she looks across the booth at Alex and Maggie, wound in each other as they are.

Maggie had been a new addition made right at the end of the school year, her level of knowledge about Kara being the Slayer pretty low. Kara is pretty sure she knows something crazy happened to Kara, but doubts it goes as deep as _a primordial vampire almost took over the world and killed me on the way to it._ But she and Alex seem happy, in a rare, sunny way. When Alex isn’t busy frowning after Kara, she’s smiling at Maggie.

Alex’s arm is draped around Maggie’s shoulders. A helpless wish slips through Kara: if you tweaked the imagery just the slightest, replacing faces and skin tones and apparel -

Kara can feel Lena’s eyes on her nearly as soon as Lena enters the club.

“I’m going to get another soda,” Kara says, clambering out of her seat and moving at a speed that brooks no argument. It’s easy to run away from things when you’re the Slayer. She waits until they clearly focus back on each other until she takes the steps two at a time to the upper level of the club, where couples come to make out or argue in peace. Lena is leant up against a railing, shadows all over her.

“Your training must be going well,” Lena offers, a wry half-smile on her face, when Kara gets close.

“J’onn told me he thought he was pushing me too hard at sparring, told me to take the night off,” Kara says. She takes the wall opposite Lena, relishing the feeling of darkness settling around her. It feels like the cemetery at night, like no one can see her. Just Lena.

“No, I meant - your senses. You knew I was here,” Lena says. She’s wearing tight jeans and a dark blouse today, her lips a blood red she’s been experimenting with lately. From what Kara’s learned about Lena’s past - and it isn’t really all that much - Lena had been eighteen when she was turned. She dresses something like a twenty-four year-old most of the time, and the curious inaccuracies of her intrigue Kara endlessly.

“Oh, well,” Kara says. She’s aware that she’s now just watching Lena’s lips. “I got the tingles.”

Lena’s lips quirk under Kara’s watch, and a heightened sense of calm drifts over her.

“You seem unhappy,” Lena says, soft. It’s quiet, up here, like they’re on top of the world. There are couples in disparate corners of the level, but it feels like it’s just them. Kara knows that J’onn might say that’s all in Lena’s nature, that she should be weary. But she doesn’t feel like that’s true. There must be some other magic at work here.

“I’m not,” Kara denies with a soft shrug. She glances down at her friends. James is craning his head toward the bar in an effort to look for her, while Winn talks. Alex has turned her head to whisper in Maggie’s ear. “At least, I don’t think so.”

“Do you want to talk about it?” Lena asks. The way they’re leant, their feet almost meet in the middle of the walkway between them. Kara remembers the lightning shock feeling of touching Lena for the first time, their hands brushing together.

“Are we in the emotional talks stage of this?” Kara asks. Lena shrugs, tilting her head up to the ceiling for a second and smiling.

“I was cursed with a soul, I might as well make use of it,” Lena says. Kara laughs then. It feels like she never laughs anymore.

“I’m sure that’s what those druids were going for,” Kara says. “She’ll have to be someone’s therapist one day, that’ll show her.”

Lena watches her, her smile growing on her face, and they settle into a comfortable silence. The band starts playing a sad love song with a brash guitar. The couples on the dance floor form up, wind their arms around each other. The whole scent of the room changes around them to something softer.

“I don’t think I’m unhappy,” Kara starts, feeling Lena’s eyes trained on her as she looks down at their feet. “I just feel...tired. Like I might die any minute, or someone else will, or a demon god will suddenly appear.”

“It’s the Hellmouth,” Lena says, shrugging. Her coat is settled beautifully on her shoulders, and she’s looking at Kara like she’s all there is to be looked at on the planet. Kara knows how that’s how vamps work, she’s studied it, seen it, fought against it. She has no way of fighting this, though. “Demon gods are part of the territory.”

“I didn’t ask for this territory,” Kara says. It feels like a release when she says it, and she feels her hands unclench. Lena watches her, her green eyes almost black. Kara remembers these eyes, right before she watched Lena’s face change, her fangs pop out. The kiss before that.

“I know,” Lena says. It’s something else, to be understood. Lena has always looked at Kara like she’s something that she can understand. It’s intoxicating. Lena draws herself to her full height, her jaw tight as she regards Kara.

“And I won’t let you die again,” Lena says. She says it so seriously that Kara feels the weight of centuries behind it. “Not while I’m around.”

Kara has nothing for that. She believes Lena.

-

“Are you still meeting with Kieran?” J’onn asks. His tone is literally all reproach, like Eliza when Kara comes home covered in slime thanks to some ugly hell creature thing. Alex, Winn, and James are all scattered around the library with her, watching.

It turns out that no one wants the vampire slayer to be friends with a vampire, still. Even though Lena’s proved herself to the group a few times over by now.

It’s a good thing no one knows about the kissing incident.

“It’s not like I set appointments,” Kara says, shrugging. It’s true. It’s more like, when no one else is with her on patrol nights, Lena stops by - or sometimes Kara can’t sleep and she sits outside on top of the shitty burger place down the street and Lena suddenly appears and talks to her until she feels like she can sleep. “And, you know, just in case you want to try respecting her, she goes by Lena, too.”

“The Council is concerned about your closeness to one of the most dangerous vampires to ever walk the earth,” J’onn says. He’s deadpan. It’s a boring narrative. There’s nothing evil in Lena, and Kara knows it, has known it since the first time they met. She’s been trained to know.

“Was the Council concerned when I died?” Kara asks. And suddenly, she just feels tired - tired of people wanting her to be something. Winn wanting her to be his perfect girl, James wanting her to be the perfect hero, Alex wanting her to be the perfect sister. The mysterious Council wanting her to be their perfect little Slayer toy.

“Kara,” J’onn says.

“Were they? Or did they start looking for the next one of me?” Kara asks, standing up.

“Kara,” Alex starts, now standing up from her seat at the next table over. She’s concerned. It’s awful. And Kara feels so _angry,_ all of a sudden. But thankfully, the door bursts open, a familiar pale figure stumbling in, her hands at her stomach.

“We’ve got problems,” Lena says, blood all over her fingers and oozing out from a large scratch along her abdomen. And then she hits the ground. Problems. Capital P.

-

Turns out there’s a rabid group of praying mantis demon people who have a real problem with vampires. This is not a usual type of problem. Anything that kills vampires is not usually a bad thing, but these praying mantis demon people seem to want to get rid of the vampires by turning them into other praying mantis demon people, but with extra powers.

“Give me another dart,” Lena says, reaching into the back window of Winn’s terrible pickup truck that they’ve commandeered as a mobile command center of sorts. They’re being pursued by a cadre of praying mantis demon people, some with curious twists on their faces. That’s the vampire thing.

“I’m working on it!” Alex shouts, her teeth tearing at a piece of twine she’s using to tie together an improvised dart capable of downing the demons. Winn swerves over at least four potholes and Kara nearly falls out the back of the pickup truck, though she manages to swing her dart-laden baseball hat hard enough to take a piece of demon skull with it.

“This is terrible,” Kara mutters, turning to look at Lena. The other girl looks like a crazy person, green gooey blood all down her shirt, heeled boots on her feet. Lena looks up at her from where she’s kneeling by the window and smiles.

For one tiny second, Kara forgets about the circumstances. There’s just a pretty girl and she’s looking up at Kara like she’s something to look at, and not in a Slayer battle woman way. Winn hits another pothole and she flies out of the pickup truck for sure this time, hitting the ground hard enough that the pavement cracks under her. Demon praying mantis people come trampling over her. It’s just...not good.

“Turn around!” Kara hears Lena shout, just before a loud screech comes up from the demon people. They all turn tail away from Kara, and when she gets a chance to open her eyes and appreciate her being alive, she can see Lena full sprinting down the street, drawing them the opposite direction. Back the way they had just came.

The pickup truck pulls up next to her with a screech. Alex is holding out a hand for her from the bed of the truck.

“No preservation instincts, the two of you,” Alex shouts. But then they’re off.

-

“I didn’t know vampires did movies,” Kara says. She didn’t know vampires did motorcycles either, until this summer, but Lena had been driving one around too. Full of surprises.

“I’m not sure what part of my agreement to see the movie indicated that I might not do them,” Lena says. She’s wearing a favored leather jacket. When Kara had brought it up, Lena hadn’t even looked at her funny before she had agreed. When Kara had mentioned that the movie was only playing twenty miles away she had nodded as though it was only reasonable. When Kara had said she’d be out late to Alex and Maggie, ensconced on the couch watching _Star Trek: Voyager_ , Maggie had only made a stabbing motion.

“I’m just surprised,” Kara says. “Scary, old vampire agrees to see romantic comedy. News at 11.”

“I can leave,” Lena says, but her smile-not-smile quirks her lips anyway. She cocks her head at Kara and the wind blows just so. It’s California movie magic, and categorically awful to experience.

“Don’t,” Kara says. “We don’t even know if they get together.”

“I’m sure I can guess,” Lena says. “But lead the way.”

-

She turns seventeen and gets asked out to homecoming on the same day. She’s pretty sure it’s unintentional on Mike’s part, because he’s about as smart as a brick. But he’s cute, in a way where he doesn’t seem totally put out by Kara having more muscles than he does. And he’s nice, in biology.

“You’re going to homecoming with Mike?” Alex asks, nearly as loudly as Kara can ever remember her shouting. Maggie, who’s sitting next to her, jolts away as though she’s gone and been shot. James starts laughing, and Winn tries not to look like he’s frowning, even though he was the one who had professed he would not go to homecoming out of protest of patriarchal values.

“He’s nice,” Kara says, shrugging. “And he won’t care if I ditch him in the middle of it.”

“Because he’s a dumbass,” Alex says. She’s still holding the cake cutting knife in her hand, and Maggie gently presses her hand downwards.

“He gave me candy when he asked me,” Kara says. She gestures toward the bag of Kit-Kats spilling out of her backpack over by the door. “Said I was sweet.”

“Do you think he googled that?” James asks. Maggie nods quickly in agreement, like Kara can’t see her. It’s probably true, but she finds that she doesn’t care. Her life isn’t normal. There’s not really a chance of her having a normal homecoming, so why care if it isn’t optimal?

It’s not like her preferred date could exactly escort her anyway.

“Are you sure about this?” Alex asks.

“Yes,” Kara says. “Mike is all I’ve ever wanted in a homecoming date.”

“I almost puked, just now, hearing that,” Alex says. “Maggie, cut this.”

They exchange holds on the cake knife.

“You shouldn’t go with someone you don’t care about just because you think it won’t matter,” Winn says, speaking up, his arms crossed. He’s sort of glaring at her. Kara isn’t jiving with it. It’s her birthday. She’ll take free Kit-Kats and an inattentive date if she wants to.

“Who do you suggest I go with?” Kara asks. Winn’s mouth runs out of precious fuel just then, because he sputters his way into silence. “I’m sure the homecoming will somehow be overrun with supernatural activity anyway, so don’t worry about his tongue in my mouth. I’ll be busy.”

“Happy fucking birthday,” Alex says, a huge slice of cake extended on a plate between them, even though she looks like she might still puke.

-

Several unexpected things happen at homecoming. For one, Mike turns out to be a werewolf. That happens pretty early on, and she has to knock him out and chain him up in a mausoleum basement at the cemetery only twenty minutes between photos with Eliza and when he wolfs out and tries to take out her throat. That’s another thing for another time.

By the time she gets to homecoming, a dance demon of some kind has taken over DJ duties and has trapped all homecoming-goers into an eternally upbeat dance to “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin.” She takes a jaunt through the crowd of cursed teenagers, amused by the wildness of James’s dancing with Lucy Lane and the dorky robot Alex seems stuck in. It’s not a good situation, but for a few minutes, it’s a funny one.

Winn looks surprised when she pulls up outside his house and pounds on his door with her homecoming dress mostly in her hands. The moment of happiness that radiates on his face is nearly painful.

“We’ve got a problem,” Kara says. His face recenters.

“What’s up?” he asks.

-

“The more I hear this song, the more I hate it,” Winn mutters, flipping through one of J’onn’s special demon monster guides. The sound of Michael Jackson is drifting through the air of the library.

“It played about this much when it came out,” Lena says. She’s standing sentry by the door, her arms crossed as she leans against the set of them. Her eyes are on Kara when she looks up, and they don’t quite get away from her fast enough.

“Was it more or less popular than the "Ride of the Valkyries"?” Winn asks. He’s all snark, put out entirely by Lena’s presence. Kara gives him a glare that he ignores. Lena doesn’t seem interested in entertaining him.

“Kara, do you need to change?” Lena asks.

“Why would she need to change?” Winn asks, straightening up over his book and directed a full body look of annoyance Lena’s way. She doesn’t bother doing the same, just eyes him.

“She’s wearing a gown,” Lena says. Winn shrugs.

“She looks like a cool-ass warrior girl,” Winn says.

“It’s a lot easier to kill demons in pants,” Lena says. Her irritation peeks through now. “And whatever she looks like shouldn’t be your concern.”

“And it’s yours?” Winn asks. Lena rolls her eyes. “You’re only here because we needed an extra set of hands and the rest of our friends are stuck dancing like _normal_ high schoolers at a dance.”

“I’m here because Kara asked me to be,” Lena says. “Just like you. We’re not so different, Winslow.”

“That’s apparent,” Winn says, as angry as Kara has ever seen him.

“Guys - ” Kara says, finally deciding to interject when Lena’s eyes go a little yellow, her vamp senses tuning upward at the same time. That’s when a big ole dancing demon drops in from the room of the library onto her head. It’s all well and good, because she wasn’t exactly sure what she was going to say anyway.

-

“I saw a rat eating a bag of popcorn underneath the football bleachers today,” Kara says, largely as greeting. Lena is eyeing her from five feet away again, her hands in her pockets.

“Is that why you’ve abandoned the big game?” Lena asks, her head turning upward a bit, like she’s listening. “You’re winning.”

“In a boring kind of way,” Kara says. “Also, Winn asked me out, finally. Right while I was eating a hot dog.”

“Tragic,” Lena says.

“I had to abandon my hot dog and pretend I could sense nefarious activity nearby,” Kara says. She taps on the steps up to the door that leads, presumably to another door to Lena’s apartment. “And here you are. Very nefarious. What’s that behind your back?”

“Six jars of pig’s blood,” Lena says, pulling one up out of the bag in her hands and turning it around in the light of the streetlamps. “If you give me twenty dollars, I’ll get you some.”

“I was hoping for some beer,” Kara says. Lena does her not-smile.

“You could have said yes to him,” Lena says. It’s probable it’s meant to sound like a proposition, but it comes out more like permission. Either way, it feels like nails down a chalkboard.

“He’s not my type,” Kara says. It’s a weak response, but Lena walks right into the danger zone.

“If he’s not, what is?” Lena asks.

“Give me some of that pig’s blood, and you might find out,” Kara says. Silence greets her, Lena’s eyes trained just above her shoulder, her jaw clenched tight. It takes more than a few terrible, no-good seconds for the full weight of the atmosphere to burn at their feet.

“Kara - ” Lena starts.

“Let’s not,” Kara says, sitting up from the stoop and placing her hands on her knees, preparing to push off the ground. Maybe, if she pushes hard enough, she’ll just fly away. That’d be cool.

“Kara,” Lena repeats, taking a step back as Kara stands and does not fly away.

“Do you want to go out to the wharf? You can drink your pig’s blood, I’ll eat a whole bag of Doritos and down a gallon of Gatorade, and maybe we’ll fight some sort of sea monster,” Kara says. Lena watches her for ten seconds more, a thousand million thoughts crossing through her eyes, turning Kara all sorts of hot and cold.

“Sure,” Lena says. “We can take my motorcycle.”

-

On the night of her senior prom, Kara finds herself in a very nice dress carrying a sword, blood from several hellhounds oozing into the fabric, Lena standing at the other end of the high school auditorium stage with a fire axe, sprinklers going off over head. Distantly, Kara can hear the sounds of her classmates yelling and running down the hall.

The hellhound carcasses spread across the stage between them are still smoking.

“So,” Lena says, adjusting her grip on the fire axe and water running down her hair, sticking it to her neck and face. “Where’s afterprom?”

Kara laughs, hard.

-

The world changes. Winn’s crush on her wanes and wanes and then only becomes snarky side comments. Alex deals well with Maggie being a werewolf, gets into college early decision at Stanford, cancels on Stanford when Kara only manages to get into Midvale University. Eliza nearly axe murders them all. Maggie gets into Emerson and breaks up with Alex along the way. A hydra tears its way through the Midvale City Hall and Kara ends up stopping it. J’onn tells her that a Slayer’s life is never easy. And it never is.

But it’s funny. So far, the hardest parts about Kara’s life aren’t the hydras, or the flying demons with the three horns, or the nightly vampires popping up to bother her.

“Graduation tomorrow,” Lena says, leant back as she is on a gravestone in the cemetery. Kara is sat across from her, their booted feet inches away from just maybe brushing. It’s been a whole two years of this, of wanting and wanting and not having. She’s stress eating.

“Yep,” Kara says. “Pomp, circumstance. “Friends Forever” on repeat. HAGS.”

“Hags?” Lena asks, turning her head sideways back and forth like an owl. Kara laughs, kicking out her toe and just nicking the corner of Lena’s Doc Martens.

“It’s an acronym,” Kara says. “Have a great summer.”

“Right,” Lena says. “I guess I’m not totally up on the lingo. What are you doing for the summer, then?”

Kara snorts, shaking around her bag of Fritos and hoping for some winners to sift free from the leftover crumbs. When she glances in, it’s still just dust.

“Why, I’m working at the local movie theater in the daytime and patrolling this fine place every night,” Kara says, shrugging. “Alex is going to visit Jeremiah in Seattle, I guess. Winn is going to visit his dad in Pennsylvania. Slayers can’t exactly abandon the Hellmouth.”

“There are other Hellmouths,” Lena says, after a second. Her eyes, as ever, are intense, and Kara can’t help but sink into them.

“I think I’d rather die again than go to Cleveland,” Kara says. Lena smiles.

“There are other other Hellmouths,” Lena repeats. “Chile, France, Japan, Norway…”

Even though it’s an offer of freedom, Kara hears it more as a signing of her fate. Midvale is what there is, now. She might’ve thought once she’d see something outside it, but her life is tied into the fabric of the town. There’s no going back now. There never was.

“Maybe one day,” Kara says. It’s a wish on the wind.

-

Kara eats so much cake at her graduation party that she falls asleep in a bean bag on her bedroom floor just after Alex disappears for a date with Maggie. That’s why she nearly concusses herself on her desk when Eliza knocks on her bedroom door and says that she has a late guest.

When Kara opens the door, Lena is there, smiling. She’s clearly made an effort to blend a little bit more than usual, wearing a t-shirt and jeans, carrying two large grocery bags. Eliza is also there, though it takes way too much time to notice her hovering a little down the hall. Kara can just tell the kind of questions and smiles she’ll get when Eliza gives a wave and presses on down the hall, her footsteps moving downstairs.

“Hi,” Lena says. “Sorry. Had to wait until...you know.”

Kara is standing there in her old gym shorts and a too-large t-shirt, like an idiot.

“Yeah, no, of course,” Kara says. “Um. I didn’t know you were coming.”

“You gave me an invitation a week ago,” Lena says, a soft smile on her face. “Told me that I had to be there or be square.”

“I didn’t think you’d actually show up,” Kara says, her voice unexpectedly quiet coming out of her own mouth. “Well. Come in.”

Lena steps into Kara’s bedroom slowly, her eyes looking around and around, like they had the last time she was here. Kara knows that J’onn would be screaming at her right now, if he could be, about letting a vampire into her space and just - not caring. But she doesn’t care, hasn’t cared. Lena is coming closer to Kara’s gymnastics medals and reaching out to touch a spelling bee trophy from the fourth grade and Kara feels like a girl in one of those movies, her crush caring about dumb things about her.

“I brought you some snacks,” Lena says, setting the grocery bags on the floor. All manner of things come spilling out onto Kara’s bedroom floor as Lena comes closer to the stack of books on Kara’s desk, fingering the spines. “Honestly, I wasn’t too sure what people do for graduation gifts.”

“Thank you,” Kara says, watching Lena. “Do you want to - I don’t know. Obviously we can’t play pin-the-degree-on-the-donkey up here.”

“Don’t tell me that’s a real game,” Lena says, giving Kara an amused glance. “What are kids doing these days?”

“We’re pinning degrees on donkeys,” Kara says. “Do you want to watch a movie with me? We can eat all these snacks - or I can eat all these snacks, I guess - and you can point out the historical inaccuracies or something.”

“Do I seem like the sort of person who would do something so annoying?” Lena says, turning to lean against Kara’s desk, her arms crossing. Kara almost wants to do the same, feeling too - open like this, alone in her bedroom with Lena. She can practically taste Lena’s presence in the room 

“When I asked you to help me study for my AP World History test, you told me that every single answer on my flashcards was wrong,” Kara says. “I got a two because of you.”

“Of all the things I feel guilty about in the history of my life, educating you on real world history is not one of them,” Lena says. “What is it you wanted to watch?”

“ _Titanic,_ ” Kara says. “I want to see if you’ll cry.”

“Fine,” Lena says. “As the other half of your graduation gift, I will watch a movie dedicated to the tragedy of human folly.”

“And the power of love,” Kara says, heading over to her television and sorting through the book of DVDs there. It’s easy enough to find, printed as it is with Leo and Kate’s faces.

“And the power of love,” Lena agrees quietly.

-

Lena comes to the movie theatre every Tuesday night when Kara finishes her shift. Her motorcycle is sleek and sits up front in the parking lot, black and menacing, and whenever Kara finishes cleaning up the lobby restrooms and sees it parked there, it feels a little less terrible.

“Where’d you get a motorcycle anyway?” Kara asks, one time, when they’ve just come out of seeing _Rush Hour 2._ This is her favorite part of the night, where they stand in the parking lot in the dark and talk. It’s a whole different world.

“The dealer,” Lena says, deadpan but not in a _are you stupid_ way.

“Yeah, but like - a dealer who let you pick up at night? Without an ID?” Kara says.

“I told him I worked the night shift, sleep all day, and could only pick it up at two a.m.,” Lena says. “And it isn’t so hard to fake an ID. I’m sure you’ll get offered one your first day on campus.”

“Do you really sleep all day?” Kara asks. Lena looks at her funny now. “I just wonder.”

“We do sleep, and since we can only really do things during the nighttime…”

“No, I mean, I know,” Kara says, and she feels the hazard lights come up on this conversation. But she pushes through. “But what do you do? You know what I do all day.”

“Because you tell me, in detail,” Lena says, laughter on her tone. “I felt like I was there when you told me about that kid climbing into the popcorn machine.”

“You could tell me things, too,” Kara says. The pause between her phrases is heavy. “If you wanted. I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you, you know.”

Lena looks at her, face too tight to even frown. Kara knows that every hackle possible is raised, can feel the unease in the air. But God, she wants whatever piece of herself Lena can give her, in the dumbest, stupidest, most useless way. Will take and take it.

“We’re friends, is what I’m saying,” Kara continues. The sentence sinks more than swims. Lena looks down at her key in the ignition like she might just drive off without answering before she takes a performative deep breath.

“We are,” Lena says. “I just - worry.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Kara says. Lena looks at her and nods slowly. The parking lot is silent all around them.

“I mostly sleep,” Lena says. “And read. I read - I was reading Pablo Neruda, earlier. Before I came here.”

“I was hoping for something a little more interesting,” Kara says, laughing, and Lena smiles back. The moment settles down around them like a blanket as hot as the sleeping sun.

-

“I got you a birthday present,” Lena says. They’re walking down the road toward Kara’s house, fresh off a successful birthday patrol to which Winn and James had brought cake and stuck around long enough to eat it and sing “Happy Birthday.” Alex is still away in Seattle, but had kept Kara trapped on a two hour long phone call where they watched _Pocahontas._ Kara misses her sister, but Lena is a near-perfect pinch hitter.

“Oh, your birthday present wasn’t impaling three vampires at once on the same broken fence post?” Kara asks, bumping just slightly into Lena’s shoulder as they amble slowly down the asphalt. Occasionally cars come zooming down and they have to dodge out of the way. “Because that was pretty cool.”

“Good to know you’re easy to impress,” Lena says, amusement on her tone. She digs a velvet bag out of her coat pocket, offering it in the space between them. Still walking, Kara takes it, feeling its weight. It’s almost nothing.

“So it’s not a pony, then,” Kara says, thumbing the shape. Lena almost laughs, though it chokes a little bit.

“Not a pony,” Lena says.

When Kara digs into the bag, she unearths a shiny, unblemished gold ring that matches with the one on Lena’s right hand. The claddagh ring, Lena had called it. It makes her stop, looking at the shape of the clasped hands holding the crowned heart. It feels suddenly very heavy in her hand. Lena stops too, curling around to stand in front of Kara. Her hand arrives to pluck the ring from Kara’s hand.

“You said you liked it,” Lena says, grabbing for Kara’s hand and the both of them ignoring the shocking feeling. Her hand slides the ring with the heart’s point down onto Kara’s right ring finger, slow and true.

“I do,” Kara says. “It’s - thank you.”

The ring shines there in the moonlight between them, almost dayglow. Lena is looking at her softly, her eyes so green and focused on Kara, like she’s looking at the only thing worth focusing on. Kara has been training hard to be better at slaying, at sensing the evils of the world, but she knows she’s lost all touch with the world when the rasp of Lena’s hand grasping hers is the only sound on her ears for these few moments.

“Of course,” Lena says, and Kara wants to kiss her. Is close enough to do it, their bodies slipping inexorably closer, like two objects stuck in a whirlpool, destined to meet in the middle. “Happy birthday.”

A car honks, loud and alarming, from behind her. Lena’s hand grips Kara’s and pulls, and by the time they make it to the sidewalk again, Kara’s laughing.

-

She goes to college. Midvale U is only twenty minutes away from home, and filled with boys and girls from around the world, and yes, she gets drunk sometimes. But more often than not, she ends up trying to work through calculus homework while sitting in a graveyard. The night that Lex Luthor arrives in Midvale, though, Kara is leaving Alex’s gay club meeting. She’s trying a whole mingling thing with her and Maggie on the outs, and that usually means two hours of Kara fending off interested parties and trying to encourage Alex to actually speak to another woman.

Lena is sitting on the ground outside her dorm room door with her head in her hands when she gets back, and she stops short. When Lena looks up, she looks all-parts relieved.

“Thank God you’re okay,” she says, voice hoarse. “I need you.”

-

Lena’s Tragic Backstory, Extended Edition unfolds in increments. The base of it is familiar: Lena got turned when she was eighteen, went on a murderous rampage, got cursed with a soul. But the story appears more intricate, as stories tend to be. Kara lets her into her single dorm; Kara sits on the bed and Lena sits at her desk, four feet away.

“There are things I haven’t told you about me,” Lena says. Kara nods, slowly, before making a humming noise. Lena is looking at the floor. The carpet is a puke brown color.

“Lena, are you - ” Kara starts, restless already. She reaches for Lena’s trembling hands before Lena picks them up and holds them in front of her in a clear _don’t touch_ way. Kara drops her hands back to the bedspread and digs in.

“Please,” Lena says, so so quiet. “Let me talk.”

-

There once was a young Irish woman in 1800 and whatever with a brother. He was the kind of vile villain that these stories always have; treacherous and arrogant. His sister wanted to be better than him, and stronger than him, and outstrip his awfulness in all things good. But the truth is that the world is unfair, and shitty, and one night, he was turned into a vampire and the very next he turned his sister. They stuck together for almost one hundred years, making their way through the world in anger and spite.

(“I didn’t want to be that,” Lena says, her hands caught together against her knee, bouncing. “I - this thing makes you that. I was so _angry_ at him that I would always be the monster I never wanted to be. I was - I didn’t - ”

“Lena,” Kara says, soft. Her knuckles are white around the fabric of her duvet.)

One simple night, they killed a woman of a druidic sect. The man abandoned his sister to be caught by the magic users, and there they placed a curse on her: to return what had been stolen, and to suffer for it. A soul.

(“He kills Slayers,” Lena says. “All of us - or. Every vampire wants to kill Slayers, but he - he hunts them down. He’s killed four.”

Kara can feel the ice in her veins, every sense on high alert. But the only vampire on her radar is Lena, her head tilted down and voice rough as rocks. Her knees sink into the shag carpet when she reaches for Lena.

“I’m not afraid,” Kara says, her fingers breaching Lena’s space and landing on the rough fabric of her dark jeans. Kara watches as Lena takes a most unnecessary breath and sinks into the pink foam of Kara’s desk chair. Her knee quiets.

“I am,” Lena says.)

-

“This is boring,” Winn says. He’s sitting in a golf cart that he’s stolen from the football grounds crew. Alex is sitting on the rooftop holding a javelin. Kara is standing four feet away from a patch of dirt that’s been freshly turned over on the sideline of the football field. Lena and J’onn are sitting in the first row of the stands, a solid eight feet apart from each other.

It’s funny. There’s been hints here and there that Lex is in town; some are big and some small. Vampires are cropping up more often and there was that whole incident where someone wrote _who slays the slayer_ on the south quad that Kara walked on her trek from her dorm to intro to bio. But it’s been a month since Lena looked up at Kara in her dorm room and told her that she would do anything to make sure Kara didn’t get hurt, every inch an achingly sincere gorgeous woman.

“Patience is an important part of a slayer’s work,” J’onn says. Very Yoda-like.

“And you said you wanted to be here,” Alex says, tapping the javelin against the side of the golf cart.

“I mean, it’s better than watching my roommate play his PS2 all night,” Winn says, shrugging. He shrieks very loudly when the vampire jumps from his grave. Kara gets one look at him in detail before Alex is jamming the pointed end of the javelin straight through his chest. Done and dusted.

“That was anticlimatic,” Winn gasps, his hand at his chest.

“That was my bio lab partner,” Kara gasps, her hand at her chest.

-

No one knows this, and no one needs to know this, but Lena spends more nights than not huddled at Kara’s desk chair. Kara has died, has been trapped in gymnasiums filled with vamps, has also encountered more than her share of creepy-crawly monsters, but there’s still a little thrill in her that her once-and-forever love interest is so worried about her that she wants to stay in the same room as her.

“I got you a slice of cake from the dining hall,” Kara announces, opening the door to her dorm room. When she looks up from kicking her shoes off, though, she sees something curious: Lena curled up on Kara’s bed, fast asleep. “Oh. More cake for me.”

It’s six at night, and so Kara settles in at her desk chair - where Lena’s favored long jacket is resting. And she starts working on her infernal calculus homework, mixed in with occasional check-ins on whatever reading J’onn’s assigned her this week. It’s something about miniature demons or whatever.

Sometimes, Kara feels trapped. From what she understands of her Intro to Psych class, that’s probably normal for someone who’s chained to a job that there is no literal escape from without death. But it’s about other things too, like the expectations of her friends and family and J’onn and even the things she fights. They expect her to be the Slayer, capital S, and so she is.

She finishes the slice of cake by the time Lena snaps awake at the sound of a drunk cavalcade of students tromping along the quad outside Kara’s dorm, full vamp face on. The sound of her snarl has Kara grabbing for the nearest wooden thing she can reach - a pencil - and whirling around.

For a second, it’s just the two of them in a dim dorm room, squared off and ready to brawl. Lena and Kara have sparred before, once or twice. But their closeness inevitably comes with the tradeoff of remembering vividly the time Kara had pressed close to Lena and put her hands on her cheeks and kissed her, unaware of the possibility that Lena could be anything other than a girl who looked at her like she was something to look at.

“You good?” Kara asks, her pencil lowering in her grip. Lena is breathing hard, fangs out, and Kara had never once thought that a vampire in full vamp mode could be attractive, but she’s thinking it now. The effect lessens once Lena seems to place herself, the ridges on her face giving way to the normal arrangement of features.

“Sorry,” Lena says. Her eyes turn back to green. “What time is it?”

“Around nine,” Kara says, tossing her pencil back on her desk and stretching her arms up. “Brought you a cake. But I ate it.”

“Cruelty thy name is Kara,” Lena mutters, swinging her legs up off the bed until they’re on the floor. Her hands press into her temples then.

“You alright?” Kara asks. She feels how much softer her voice is, feels how her hands itch to touch Lena. Without her coat and without her leather boots on, she looks like something normal and good, like a cute girl who’s fallen asleep in Kara’s bed and not a cagey vampire with a Tragic Past and a judicious use of tongue while kissing.

“Yeah,” Lena says. “I’m good. Sorry about…”

One of her hands drops to her side and grips at the duvet of Kara’s bed. Kara watches her fingers clench tight, the ring on her finger shining. Kara adjusts her glasses on her face.

“What’s wrong?” Kara tries again. Lena’s head drops lower in her hand.

“Just a dream,” Lena says, then sighs, picking her head up and looking at Kara. “You want me to talk about it, I assume.”

“I had a dream last night that I got beheaded on a roller coaster,” Kara says, shrugging. “I thought the rules of friendship meant we talked about things. This hour I tell things in confidence and all that.”

“It was a memory from India, just before I left him,” Lena says. She looks out the window. “He found this - boy, I guess, on the streets. Brought him back to our spot and killed him for me as a going away present. He had always been brutal, I knew that, but with the - with the soul it was just. Awful.”

Kara isn’t sure what to say to that, but she stands up. Lena turns to look at her.

“The last Slayer he caught when I was with him was this woman in Japan, and he - well, he tortured her. Strung her up from the ceiling and bled her dry. We were in this warehouse and the blood was like rain, coming from the sky,” Lena says.

“I know,” Kara says, shifting on her feet and stepping the slightest closer. “J’onn has me studying his kills.”

“He won’t strike the same way as before,” Lena says. “He never does.”

“I know that, too,” Kara says. “J’onn has Alex throwing tennis balls at my head at random times to practice being surprised.”

“Right,” Lena says, all bitterness. “That will help.”

Kara feels mutual irritation rise in her as sudden as a snake in grass, her hands landing on her hips as she regards Lena.

“Your attitude sure helps too,” Kara says, drily. “Like, I get it. He’s a bad dude. I know that. But can’t you just - believe in me, a little bit?”

“I’ve seen him shred people limb for limb,” Lena says, her voice low, and she rises up from the bed fluid and gorgeous and now they’re all of four feet apart arguing about Kara’s possible second death in heated whispers. “He’s more dangerous than anything you’ve ever faced, and you’ve already died once.”

“Well, I’ll make sure my real, official funeral gets planned for the daytime,” Kara says, crossing her arms. “No invitation for you.”

“As if I wouldn’t be dusted already,” Lena says. Kara can feel steam coming out of her own ears.

“If you’re so scared for me, then why don’t you just - go? Before I die, or before he catches you protecting me,” Kara says. “If there’s nothing to stop him, why not just - go enjoy Thailand for a century?”

“Because - ” Lena says, and then her voice cuts out like someone’s got a hand around her throat. Kara feels her hands clench tight on her biceps.

“Is there some special reason you want to just stand around and watch me get obliterated? I know that Slayer blood tastes good, but surely there are better ways to recieve it than from me being strung up on the ceiling,” Kara says. Lena’s eyes are wide.

“I don’t - ”

“Then what is it?” Kara asks, voice halting and eyes hot. “Why are you here if you think there’s nothing coming out of it?”

It comes out like an accusation, and Lena takes it on the chin, her jaw tight as she looks at Kara. She’s wearing a black button down, black jeans. Even black socks.

“I don’t think I owe you an explanation,” Lena says, slow as molasses. Kara scoffs, raises her hand to swipe that comment out of the air.

“You do,” Kara says. “You know you do.”

“I didn’t think I had to give you one,” Lena says, much quieter, her posture leaking of confrontation. Kara can feel a tear track down one cheek in perfect timing with the warm-cold switch her heart takes on the next dramatic turn of phrase. “I thought you knew.”

“You kissed me once,” Kara says, wiping at her face. “What did that mean?”

“I - Kara,” Lena says, clearly shocked that Kara has breached the topic they’ve been avoiding for actual years.

“You kissed me and I forgot everything else but us,” Kara says. “I haven’t thought a thing about anyone else since I met you, you know that? And I’m tired of pretending that that’s not true. So tell me why you’re here, if you think I’ll die.”

“Because you can’t die,” Lena says, her voice now distraught. “I can’t - I won’t let you. You know why, Kara. You know why I kissed you, too.”

“Maybe I do know,” Kara says, wiping at the tears now rolling on her face. “But if it’s true - you have to be on my side.”

“I am on your side,” Lena says. “Always.”

Kara’s chest feels so hot it might as well encompass the sun, and Lena’s hand is cold when it brushes the skin of her face, pushing away tears. When Lena steps closer, she wraps an arm around Kara, and they sink together until Kara feels equilibrium settle on her heart.

-

Kara is in her Intro to Psych lecture when the lights go out. She is immediately clocked in the face, her head ping-ponging from the wall she leans against during class back into her attacker’s fist, this time cracking her down onto her desk. Whoever it is is strong, unnaturally so, and her eyes are having trouble adjusting to the sudden dark combined with the blood pulsing into her eye.

There are screams echoing through the hall outside, and through the classroom. Kara hears crashing, and people yelling for help, but she hears just about perfectly the voice in her ear:

“Send my regards to that girl you call Lena, Slayer,” and then her body is cracked into the wall. She feels a rib give way at the same time she takes a flat thing to the face. Her glasses crack there, digging into the bone of her nose.

The next thing she knows when she wakes up is Alex hovering over her, the lights on and tears in her sister’s eyes.

“It’s Winn,” Alex says.

-

Winn isn’t dead, but his leg is broken. In fact, more than a few students end up in the same emergency department as him, accompanied by police who seem more than concerned about a random, coordinated attack on one specific academic hall. They’re all people Kara knows. A guy she was in a group project with in her psych class, her RA, the tech girl who had helped her with a fritzy computer in the lab a couple days ago. Kara walks through the ER in circles and circles until J’onn finds her.

“It isn’t your fault,” is all he says, once he has ahold of her by the elbow and he’s looking at her. One of his large hands comes up to rest against the now-sewn shut gash above her eyebrow.

“It _is_ my fault,” Kara says. “He attacked all these people because of me. He could have killed me in that classroom, and he didn’t.”

“You’re saying he was there,” J’onn says, shock coloring his tone. Kara nods, looking down the hallway where James is falling asleep on Alex’s shoulder. “How do you know?”

“He spoke to me,” Kara says. “Told me to say hello to Lena. Before he used a psychology book as a battering ram for my face.”

“So he knows Kieran is in Midvale aiding the Slayer,” J’onn says. “All the same. Why not just kill you?”

The answer comes rounding the corner in a black coat and an expression of just barely-contained fear. Kara hadn’t even realized the sun had fallen.

“Are you alright?” Lena asks. Kara can feel the magnetic pull of Lena’s hand as it half-raises between them, her eyes aimed at the purpling bruise around Kara’s nose and the gash on her eyebrow. “I was - ”

J’onn stands to his full height and clears his throat.

“Kieran,” he says, voice full and deep and intimidating, worlds away from how he had just been speaking to Kara. “Is it wise for you to be here?”

Kara is fairly certain he means in a hospital packed with weak and bleeding people, but the abject confusion on Lena’s face shows off just how little she’s thinking about it.

“Where else should I be?” Lena asks. Kara sees J’onn’s jaw go tight as a vise, his eyes widening and nose flaring.

-

“How long has Kieran been a problem?” J’onn asks. They’re in his kitchen, the five of them with steaming mugs of tea and coffee. James is sitting back with his arms crossed, Kara with her hands on her mug, Winn with his leg in its cast and crutches leant behind him, and Alex standing just behind Kara, pacing.

“What do you mean?” Kara asks, and she gets the distinct impression the initial question was not meant for her when J’onn’s heavy stare directs her way and then looks to the surrounding group.

“She’s in love with Kara,” J’onn says, flat and clean as day. “How long has that been a problem and why has no one bothered to inform me?”

The whole gathering freezes in place both physically and metaphysically - the latter being mostly in Kara’s mind. J’onn looks from James to Winn to Alex, and finally back to Kara.

“One of the most vicious, dangerous creatures in human history is in love with a Slayer, and you have nothing to say?” J’onn asks. “If the Council heard word of this, they’d very well have the both of you slaughtered.”

“The Council can suck my ass if they think they can kill Kara for that,” Alex says, harsher than sandpaper. Kara turns to look at her and finds her looking sideways, angry in profile. It feels like the moments before a bomb goes off.

“I’m sorry, you’re saying that Lena is in love with Kara?” James asks, his hands flat on the table. “Like. Just to be sure. That’s what you’re saying.”

“While I have accepted Kieran’s closeness to the Slayer on account of her soul, I have long suspected that she has ulterior motives,” J’onn says. “I’ve seen how concerned for Kara she is. It’s dangerous.”

“Are you sure you’re not the one with a concussion?” Kara asks. J’onn glares at her heavily.

“Kieran’s closeness to this group puts us all at greater risk while Lex is hunting us down,” J’onn says. “And I want you all to know that, and I want you to talk to me about this.”

There’s silence for a few moments, the group looking from one to another.

“It’s been a while,” Winn says, finally, adjusting how his leg is stretched out across the floor. “Since they met, probably.”

“But Kara’s never returned her feelings,” Alex says, piling on. Kara has to restrain her already bruised facial muscles from wincing. “But she’ll listen to Kara if we tell her to leave.”

“She’s the most powerful ally we have,” Kara says, her fingers flexing on her mug of coffee. “Maybe we need her in this fight.”

“Lex is capable of manipulating his sister into doing terrible things and you know that,” J’onn says. “Soul or no, friend or no, if she’s here in Midvale, he’ll know and he’ll hurt you worse.”

Kara can hear the thrumming roar of the motorcycle as it peels down J’onn’s street, away, and into the distance. This time, she winces, and it fucking hurts.

-

Lena finds her in the cemetery that night, a bag slung over her shoulder and characteristic black coat buttoned. Kara is sitting on the ground up against a gravestone, eating gummy bears even though chewing hurts her face. She doesn’t even wait for Lena to end her gloomy hovering by announcing herself.

“So you’re leaving,” Kara says. Lena walks into Kara’s field of view then, her eyes tight on Kara’s face. Kara can imagine what she’s seeing - black and blue and purple bruises, swollen forehead and nose, stitches, and hopefully, angry blue eyes. But her face doesn’t look pitying or worried. She just looks - sorry.

“It’s for the best,” Lena says. “J’onn’s right. My presence is a liability for the group and for you. It always has been.”

“I don’t care about J’onn or the Council or - whatever other bullshit,” Kara says, shoveling gummy bears into her mouth and looking steadfastly in not Lena’s direction.

“Care about your friends then. Winn could have died,” Lena says. “Lex wants to torture you.”

“He’ll do that whether you’re here or not. He hunts Slayers. There’s only one of me. You leaving will only save you from watching me get killed,” Kara says. “And if you’re here, at least you could help us stop him.”

“He wants to torture me through you, too,” Lena says, voice soft. “If J’onn and your friends know about us, then he does too.”

It practically burns Kara’s throat, the way a thousand words want to come flying out of her. But she focuses on the grass in front of her, wet with dew, and chewing her gummy bears until she swallows.

“I don’t care,” Kara says. Lena sighs, her stance shifting as she comes somewhat closer.

“Kara,” Lena says. Kara picks her head up then, pushing her glasses up her nose, and looks Lena in the face.

“I don’t care,” Kara repeats, spitting it out. “You told me that you wouldn’t let me die again.”

“I won’t,” Lena says, sure as the sun will rise. 

“You told me that you were on my side,” Kara says, scrambling up with the help of the gravestone against her back and pointing at Lena’s stupid, beautiful face. Lena still doesn’t look anything but sad, her face glum and broody.

“I am,” Lena says.

“Then stay,” Kara says, and she’s so angry with herself with how pleading it sounds. She sounds like a child, yelling at a wall. “Stay with me.”

“I want to,” Lena whispers. Her breath doesn’t fog the air like Kara’s does. “Kara, you know that I want to, but I can’t risk you. I won’t risk you.”

“You will hurt me worse than he ever could,” Kara says, like it’s a telenovela, and she’s crying. Mad enough that she turns and kicks her enormous bag of gummy bears and the bag pretty much explodes, gummy bears spraying over the ground ahead of her at varying distances. “You can’t leave me. You know that I - have a thing about leaving. I’ve told you about my parents, and about Jeremiah. You know all of that, all about me."

“I know,” Lena says. “But you have good people with you and I - I’m not good, Kara. That’s okay. You’ll be okay.”

“I have people who expect me to solve their problems,” Kara says. “And people I worry about dying, all the time. People who _are_ dead. The whole world, on my shoulders. People who tell me that I’m doing a bad job at saving the world, and I have a failing grade in calculus because I can’t - I can’t - ”

Lena is coming closer then, and Kara can’t help but fall into her arms like she’s an addict. Kara can feel the finality of it in the coldness of her chest, tries to dig deeper into the embrace to gather warmth from it. Lena lets her, pulls Kara closer until it feels like they’re an amorphous blob of vampire and Slayer, blending together. Even though she can feel it, Kara tries, one more time.

“Please stay,” Kara says. “I love you.”

“You’re going to be okay,” Lena says, her hands tight on Kara. She pulls away the slightest, looking at Kara’s face, one of her hands reaching to settle at the juncture of Kara’s jaw and neck. “I promise." 

“Lena,” Kara says, gripping her hands into the fabric of Lena’s coat. “Listen to me. I want you here, with me. Please stay.”

“I am on your side,” Lena says. She doesn’t even seem to react as Kara’s head presses forward until their foreheads rest against each other, gripping for Kara’s right hand and pulling it up between them. Kara feels a new wave of hot tears slip down her face when Lena reaches it up to her lips and presses a kiss to her hand, where the ring Lena gave her sits, now worn and loved. “I’m on your side, okay?”

“Okay,” Kara whispers, pressing tighter into Lena’s body. Kara feels like she might actually fall apart, the various pieces that make her up unbuckling and giving up.

“Don’t forget,” Lena says, her hand gripping tight at Kara’s, her arm winding around Kara’s neck until they’re wound together again. Kara nods against Lena’s temple, and she just - can’t breathe.

Nothing in her whole life: her parents dying, becoming the Slayer, burning down her old high school’s gym, the Master’s teeth in her neck, dying, being brought back to life - none of that burns worse than Lena’s grip tightening on her and her chest rumbling with sound and no breath under Lena’s ear.

“I love you, too,” Lena says. “I have to go.”

Lena goes. Into every generation there is born a slayer, and she doesn’t even get kissed.

-

When she comes back to her dorm room that night, there’s a Butterfinger surely purchased at the vending machine down the hall. It’s King Sized, and Kara eats it in small chunks while she blasts “Warning Sign” and cries. Her face hurts the entire time.

The next day, at J’onn’s scheduled meeting, the _thwack_ of her hand hitting the table has a harsh metallic dimension. She hadn't been able to take the ring off, even when she stared at it all night.

“Lena is gone,” Kara says, bold-lettered and uncaring if it comes off any certain way. Her face is swollen and she hurts. “How do we stop Lex?”

-

It turns out that tracking Lex down takes a little more work than she had anticipated. Alex ends up talking to the tech girl who had got smacked around by the vampires about semi-legal hacking.

“So your plan is to track - blood purchases?” Sam asks. She’s got one of her arms in a sling. J’onn is pacing in the back of the computer lab. Winn, who’s sitting next to her with his cast, nods excitedly.

“Yep,” Winn says. “We need your help with the firepower. It’s black market stuff, and we need a little more coverage just in case they get a little groovy.”

“Does he always talk like this?” Sam asks, quirking a brow at Alex, who laughs and actually _blushes_. Kara is standing stock still by the door, her arms crossed. “Does this have to do with the attack?”

James, who’s leaning up against the table by Winn, looks from J’onn to Kara and then shrugs.

“Sort of,” he says. “And it’s important you don’t tell anyone that you’re helping us.”

“Secret spy mission,” Sam says, nodding before cracking her knuckles. “Cool. Can we start now?”

“Hell yeah,” Winn says, picking his cast up off the ground and spin-spin-spinning it so he lines up with the computer before him. “Someone start blasting the _Mission: Impossible_ theme.”

-

Kara Danvers has the distinct pleasure of meeting Lex Luthor for the second time just outside an abandoned auto-shop a few miles from campus. He’s handsome - looks like his sister in funny ways, around the eyes and such. He’s got on a pea coat wears a beard, and his hair is floppy and unkempt. He looks nothing less than amused by her appearance, sitting on a stack of tires and watching him.

“Hello, Kara,” he says, his hands in his pea coat. “How’d you find me?”

“Mad skills,” she says. “Any chance you want to call this whole vendetta off?”

“No fun in that,” Lex says, shrugging before he pulls his hands out of his pockets and behind his back. “How is my sister these days?”

“My guess is as good as yours,” Kara says, cool as a cucumber. “She disappeared a week ago.”

“Sounds like her,” Lex says, a smile on his face. His fangs are out, and they catch the streetlights perfectly well. “Are you here to dust me?”

“That’s the plan,” Kara says, jumping off the stack of tires and landing capably on the ground, falling into her fight stance. Lex doesn’t do the same, just stands there and looks at her, his head cocking to the side. He lifts one finger straight into the air, and a loud cracking sound comes from the distance.

“Kara!” yells Alex, stationed on the balcony of the next house over from the auto shop. There’s a person wrapped around her, her dark hair blending into the black of Alex’s jacket. Even from a distance, the face is immediately recognizable to Kara. It feels like her stomach drops through the floor.

“As it turns out, Kieran is doing quite well,” Lex says. Kara watches for a moment as Alex struggles in Lena’s arms before she can bear to turn back and look at Lex. “I guess she got bored toying with you.”

“Your fight is with me,” Kara says, trying to keep the shake out of her voice. “Let her go.”

“I am aware of who my fight is with, Slayer,” Lex says. “But would you believe it, I’m not interested today.”

He snaps his finger down so that his hand forms a fist, and Kara hears another cracking sound, followed by a thump. Kara doesn’t even get to turn to see, because Lex has grabbed ahold of the lapel of her coat and picked her clear off the ground. When she tries to kick out, he extends his arm, and so she begins trying to wiggle free from her coat.

“You’re spirited, I’ll give you that,” Lex says. “I can see why Lena stuck around for as long as she did. She always liked a fighter.”

Lex drops her, directly onto his oncoming foot. Her still-healing rib takes a direct, high-powered kick, and she hits the side of the auto shop heavily. All breath knocked from her.

“But you’re weak, too young,” Lex says, a _tsk_ ing noise coming from his mouth as he presses his booted foot onto her ankle and leans down until it cracks and her vision blackens. “That damned Council, putting up a child and calling her a savior. I’ll take your blood at full strength, nothing less.”

And he leaves her there on the pavement, disappearing down the street with Lena on his arm. Kara half-crawls, half-limps to the house, feeling tears tracking on her face, the ring on her finger like a burn. When she gets there, Alex is groaning, her body having burrowed deep into a massive bush on the walkway of the house.

“Alex?” Kara asks, trying to reach for a branch and snap it. But she just feels exhausted. Alex is trying to wiggle her way out.

“I’m okay,” Alex says. “This bush is full of fucking beetles, but I’m okay. Oh shit, one of them is in my shirt.”

-

Later that night, Alex is sitting with Kara in her dorm room, eyeing her carefully. Her sister keeps self-consciously smacking her head because she thinks beetles are still crawling all over her, but she seems more concerned with Kara and her swollen ankle.

“You sure you want me to go?” Alex asks, patting along Kara’s thigh as though securing her into bed will protect Kara from all evils of the world. “Because I can stay. This shag carpet looks very comfortable.”

“I’m fine,” Kara says. “I’ll be fine.”

Alex looks at her closely for a few moments, before she looks around the room and back to Kara.

“She said something to me before she threw me into a bush,” Alex says. “ _I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you_. Do you know what that means?

An awful, horrifying mix of relief and fear and anger come flooding into her system then, and she drops her head to her hands.

“It’s a Walt Whitman poem,” she says. “It’s...a message for me.”

Alex sighs, looking around and around like she’ll find someone watching them.

“She loves you. I feel like...she’s got a plan. Maybe a dumbshit one, but. A plan,” Alex says, then pauses. “You love her.”

Kara can’t help the choking feeling in her throat that gives way to the tears on her face. Alex wraps her up, then, winding her way around Kara’s body until she feels something like warm again.

-

Alex is using her survival adrenaline to cheer Kara through training, which consists largely of jogging around on the still-shifting bones of her ankle and avoiding the long reach of J’onn’s bo staff.

“You’ve got this, Kara!” Alex yells, way too loudly for J’onn’s backyard. Kara inner mind flashes to Lena’s arm wrapped around Alex’s neck, fangs bared. “Ah, shit.”

Kara lies there with her back flat on the ground for a few seconds, contemplating the relative grayness of the sky. Her ankle is throbbing, her ribs are too, and her face - still hurts. J’onn appears over her, his bo staff jabbing into her stomach.

“Up,” he says, and Kara manages to scramble to her feet just in time to catch the staff as it comes flying at her head. It makes her hands sting, and the metal of her ring bites her finger, but she at least stops the attack long enough to get out of its way. His swing is strong, no holds barred. He comes back up from the other side, and she deflects that away too.

He sweeps at her feet; she jumps, stumbling backward when she lands. He advances, his swing coming from the side and then cutting suddenly downward; she ends up taking it on the forearm where a web of pain spreads out.

“Come on,” Alex shouts, her voice drifting further away from Kara as she tries to level her focus. J’onn swings low with one hand and throws a cut aimed at her jaw; she jumps the swing and knocks his hand away from her. When she comes down, she lands on the bo staff, and it cracks under the force, dislodging itself from his hand forcefully. She kicks out and catches him in the stomach, and he goes stumbling; she reaches and grabs the two splintered halves of the staff and whaps his head once to set his ears ringing, then takes a jump spin to hit his shoulder square on. He hits the ground on one knee, his hand clutched to his shoulder.

Her vision is all sorts of hazy, and there’s no sound now, nothing but the blood pulsing in her ears as she wraps her hand tight around one side of the staff and hits the corner of his eye. The added solidity of the hit brings blood up to the surface, and he falls backward, and she’s reaching for the pointier staff to bring it down into this chest -

“Kara!” Alex yells, and Kara stops. Her chest is heaving. J’onn is looking up at her with a measured stare, nothing on his mouth. Kara steps back, dropping from her left hand the end of the staff she had been about to stab him with. Her right hand has blood on it, covering up the glint of the ring.

She drops that half too, then. It takes forty minutes, but she finally gets all the blood out of the grooves of the metal and her skin.

-

Sam asks her about the ring one day in the computer lab, while Kara is trying to switch off between reading about chupacabras and _All the President’s Men._ Sam has been typing and typing and typing, and it’s a calming sound in a calming room, the whirring of computer fans and the dimness leaving Kara at a somewhat peace.

“Who’s the ring for?” Sam asks. Kara is distracted from the very gross photos of a mangled human body in the chupacabra reading and glances up. “The claddagh ring.”

Sam pronounces it flawlessly, and it rings the memory of Lena talking about it at three in the morning with her. She feels a frown overtake her face as she reaches down to roll it around her finger. She had thought a couple times of taking it off, but it was comforting at this point, more than anything.

“It was a gift,” Kara says. Sam hums, impressed, already turning back to her computer.

“Nice gift,” Sam says. “Did whoever give it to you explain it? I feel like a lot of people think they’re just pretty, which isn’t cool considering they’re like. Culturally significant in Ireland.”

“Explain it?” Kara asks. Sam spins back around.

“You know, the heart pointing whichever way on whichever finger,” Sam says. Kara frowns deeper. “You’re wearing it on your right hand, unengaged. The heart is pointing towards you, so you aren’t looking for a relationship, either because you’re in one or you just don’t want one.”

Kara blinks, looking down at the ring. She had always worn it this way, ever since Lena had placed it on her finger this way, ages ago now. Before everything. It practically burns her in this moment, her eyes watering. It takes a full half minute to gather a response that isn’t overrun with tears.

“Huh,” Kara says. It sounds more like a croak than anything else. If she had it in her, she’d track Lena down just to yell at her for forty minutes straight.

“By the way, does your sister like chocolate chip or sugar cookies more? Asking for a friend,” Sam says, sounding very much like she’s trying to be casual. It makes Kara laugh a watery laugh.

-

As big bads tend to do, Lex outsources his work, sending weird demon after weird demon their way. But they work on doing the same: Sam does hacking stuff whenever they need it, Alex trains and trains, James and Winn work on learning as much as they can about the cabal Lex is traveling with, including plenty of breakdown on Lena’s work as a vampire. It’s a treacherous record of villainy, to put it lightly - and J’onn seems to punctuate every lesson with a pointed look. He seems altogether crazed by the whole Lex thing. He makes her do all sorts of crazy things, like stand on one foot for forty minutes, or recite the military code alphabet backwards. One day he makes her stare into a crystal until she passes out.

“You should sleep more,” Alex says, sitting on the swingset next to Kara. The graveyard is visible from here, a weird quirk of city planning. Midvale at its finest.

“You should too,” Kara says. The stake in her hands is long and a funny wobbly shape. For a second she can imagine plunging it into Lena’s chest, but it makes her hands burn.

“Lex must be getting antsy,” Alex says, as a fresh patch of Earth they’ve been watching for hours finally starts moving. “Seventh vampire in three days.”

“Must be,” Kara says. She’s in the middle of vaulting over the playground fence when she gets sideswiped by a blurry force that she rolls away from. All of a sudden, she’s facing down both a baby vampire and...Lena. She drops her raised stake immediately, only to get tackled into the fence by the baby vampire.

“Shit, Kara!” Alex yells, but she too is overrun with vampires, three of them. One of them gets dusted, as far as Kara can see, but another manages to disarm her and pick her up. “Kara!”

“Alex!” Kara yells, just before the baby vampire goes all teeth, grabbing for her shirt collar and yanking it halfway down her shoulder. She’s forced to dust him from the back, and it’s fucking disgusting when it gets in her mouth - but she clambers up off the remains of the fence she’s on and starts sprinting after Alex, who’s getting carried toward a waiting car.

She gets rocked into a slide. It’s metal and warps beneath her when she crushes it downward. Lena is standing four feet away, watching her, eyes yellow, and Kara sees Alex get a good kick on one of the vamps wrestling her into the car before the other one - a girl - hits her hard enough that Kara hears it. Alex’s head lolls to the side.

Kara turns and starts climbing up the slide, ducking her head beneath the safety rail, and starts running through the way-too-huge play complex. She makes it to the second bridge when she gets taken down again, Lena landing on top of her heavily, with enough momentum that Kara rolls her up and backwards. They end up struggling to a stop, Kara halfway to pinning Lena to the coated metal before Lena rolls her over and bashes Kara into the metal bars of the playset.

The car disappears with a screech, and Kara grabs ahold of the loose metal bar behind her head and pulls hard enough that it comes free, bringing it down on what she can reach of Lena. She scrambles free again, launching headfirst down a plastic slide.

She grabs for her cell phone, which Eliza had instructed her to use only in case of emergencies, because the minutes were mostly used for her work - and flips it open while she’s running toward the tire swing on the edge of the playground Winn had got stuck in last year. But Lena catches her again, pulls her down forcefully enough that Kara’s phone snaps and sputters sparks when she hits the ground.

“You don’t want to pick a fight with them,” Lena spits out, as she holds Kara down. It feels like Kara’s skin is ground to dust from the multiple road rashes she’s picked up in this run and tackle adventure, but the skin of her wrist beneath Lena’s hands are thrumming a warmth she hasn’t felt in two months.

“And you want to pick one with me?” Kara says, bucking her hips up and trying to break free of Lena’s hold.

“Stop moving,” Lena says. Kara can’t help but laugh, moving all the same as she tries to get out from under Lena and watching as Lena struggles to hold her down.

“Or what? You’ll kill me?” Kara asks, nearly spits it out. She can’t hear the car Alex got put into anymore, and it feels like it sets her on edge.

“I have to do this,” Lena says, her eyes pleading. Kara just feels _angry,_ worried over her sister - if Lena really is on their side, she’s doing a great job of convincing Lex that she isn’t and is doing a real shitty job of telling Kara. She’s just angry.

“Go ahead! There’ll be another one of me to kill tomorrow! Maybe you can play with her too - ”

Lena jabs something very painful and buzzy into her side, and Kara passes out. She’s getting real fucking tired of that.

-

She wakes up when someone dumps a bucket of water on her, and she comes to spluttering, scrambling up to her feet when Lex speaks. She almost slips on the concrete beneath her, but manages to come up into some sort of fighting stance.

“You said you wouldn’t rough her up too much, Kieran,” Lex says, laughing, his hands behind his back. He’s wearing a suit, which seems a bit extra. Voices around the large warehouse they’re in laugh, and Kara isn’t even sure what he’s talking about - she feels like everything hurting is surface. But there’s blood running onto her shirt when she glances down - maybe she had busted her chin or something.

“I’m not interested in apologizing,” Lena’s voice says, smokey and low, and Kara can see her just beyond Lex in a chair, a woman hovering just over her shoulder. Kara can feel her eyes trained on her.

“I won’t expect one then,” Lex says, still smiling too-wide. “Well, well, well. Little Miss Slayer. So good to see you again.”

“Where’s my sister?” Kara asks. Lex gives a nod behind her, and Kara slip-slides to turn around and see not just Alex, but James and J’onn and Sam all right there, unconscious. Hovering above them is, no joke, a car, hanging from a cable. When she turns back around, Lex is settling into a chair near Lena’s.

“What is this?” Kara yells, hearing the strain of the cable behind her. “Why not just kill me?”

“Would you believe me if I said this was more fun?” Lex asks. “Eve.”

Kara turns and runs faster than she had thought she could, and manages to just get there when the cable lets go. It’s fucking heavy, heavier than she had even expected, and her body buckles under the pressure. Beneath her, her friends are still unconscious.

“Eve,” Lex repeats, and then Kara feels electricity come thrumming through the car on her shoulders in a sudden shock that has her falling to one knee, struggling to keep it balanced and not crush one of their heads.

“Alex,” Kara says, looking at her sister, trying to just breathe. Just breathe. “Alex, please wake up.”

“Isn’t this fun, Kieran?” Lex asks, practically giggling. “I bet you missed this.”

Lena doesn’t respond. Kara feels herself lose even more to the weight of the car, dropping now to both knees.

“Alex,” Kara says, and this time Alex begins to stir, her head picking up off the ground and her eyes opening. She doesn’t speak before Lex, her eyes widening when another shock of electricity comes through the car, this one longer. Kara feels her body shake. “Alex, get them out.”

Alex scrambles backwards, hitting James in the face on the way out, and Kara feels everything start to go dim, trying to hold herself up and withstand the electricity. She feels more than sees Alex and James struggle to get the others out from under the car, and then her body just - drops.

The car crushes atop her, but there are still wheels attached - glass shatters onto her legs as she settles relatively safe underneath the car. She feels - worn out, worse than she ever has. Alex comes scrambling under the car, reaching for her hand. 

“Come on, Kara,” Alex says, and Kara shakes her head as best she can.

“Get out,” Kara says, hoarse, hearing shoes on concrete from behind her. “Just get out, get them out, Alex."

“Kara, I won’t leave you,” Alex says, just as Kara gets pulled out from under the car, her legs catching up some of the glass. It bites, hard, and she groans from the way whoever it is twists her ankle to roll her over.

“Kara Danvers,” Lex says. “Your parents dying on a humanitarian trip to Bangladesh when you were eleven. Didn’t even get to see them die. Two of your aunts and uncles with them. Sad stuff. Very heroic origin story.” 

Kara can just barely see Lena stand from her chair, coming closer to Lex, her hands free of her pockets as Lex stares down at Kara.

“You know, it’s funny,” Lex says. “You live that whole life. You save the world a few times, even. But you’ll be dead like the rest of them.”

Thankfully, that’s when Alex drives a car through the side of the warehouse.

-

When she finally gets into her dorm room, Kara feels like she could sleep for ten years. The memory of Lex’s face, his words, of Lena, of the fear in her heart when she could feel herself giving into the weight of the car.

She reaches into her coat pockets, digging out the wallet and keys that had miraculously stayed put during her daring electricity adventure, and feels something else.

It’s a snack size bag of cookies, the bag charred to bits but still somewhat recognizable. Kara knows who it’s from without even thinking about it, knows what it means. She drops the bag on her desk and twists the ring on her finger until she falls asleep.

She dreams of Lex taking a shard of glass from the car windows and dragging it deep from her neck to her belly button, Lena watching in silence from the sideline, blood seeping into Kara’s throat, filling her lungs up, just like the first time. She wakes up and coughs and coughs and coughs.

-

They go to Alien Bar two weeks later, because Sam suggests it as a therapeutic visit, and Alex agrees because she thinks Sam might dance with her. Winn agrees because he’s out of his cast finally, and James agrees because Winn agrees. And Kara agrees because - well. It feels like there’s nothing else to do other than agree. J’onn agrees to drive them all home at exactly midnight, or else.

“There’s a monster on the loose,” he says. “I’ll be right outside the whole time.”

Sam buys them all shots, and they settle down into a booth in the back corner, nursing drinks of varying sizes and colors. Kara, like always, knows the second Lena arrives.

“I’m going to the bathroom,” Kara says, standing up and weaving through the crowd before Alex or anyone can stop her. They’ve been worried about her, Alex demanding to sleep on the floor of her dorm room and James escorting her around campus when he can. She waits until she’s sure they can’t see her before she goes bounding up the stairs to the rafters.

Lena doesn’t bother trying to hide. She’s posted up in a corner directly over the group, shadow on her face. She’s wearing her usual coat, hands deep in the pockets. Kara stops a few feet from her, leaning on the railing.

“Are you alright?” Lena asks.

“Why are you here?” Kara asks, ignoring the whole thing. She is demonstratively not alright; is not really sure when she last was alright.

“I needed to see you,” Lena says. “I needed to talk to you.”

“I don’t want to fucking talk to you,” Kara says. “You threw my sister off a balcony, you kidnapped me. I could have died. You’re working with your brother.”

“I’m not,” Lena says. “I’m right here, Kara. I threw Alex into a plant to save her. I knew you could handle that car trap and if you couldn’t have I would have stopped it. I’m on your side.”

“Are you? Or are you here to - I don’t know. Psychologically torture me? Is this a new frontier in Lex’s game? Because it’s fucking shitty.”

“This hour I tell things in confidence,” Lena says, and Kara stops in her tracks. She flashes back, of course, to that electric moment when Lena had put her hand in Kara’s and the world had stopped turning. She feels tears come up in her eyes just as suddenly, shaking her head. “I’m sorry, Kara. Please. I love you.”

Kara tries to breathe around the knot in her chest, her hand gripping tight to the railing next to her.

“Okay,” Kara says. “I trust you. Why are you here?”

“I needed to see you,” Lena repeats, her eyes still worried as she tilts her head downward to try to look Kara in the eye. Kara’s head is aimed downward, watching as Alex is craning her neck around the bar. It’s only a matter of time before Eliza’s precious phone minutes get wasted on Alex tracking her down.

“You’ve seen me. You should leave,” Kara croaks. “Before they see you.”

“I will,” Lena says. She takes one single step closer to Kara, and Kara picks her head up to watch her advance. Her head is a mosh pit of confusion and trust and love and betrayal and hatred. “Lex is planning to awaken a demon to end the world.”

“Oh, good,” Kara says. “Couldn’t he just kill me and be done with it?”

“It appears his ambitions have grown,” Lena says, drily. “I thought that joining him would protect you, because he’d - if I was here with you, he’d find a way to torture us both. I’ve been trying to figure out his plan but he’s still cagey with me. He doesn’t trust me yet, and I - this is the best way for me to help. I’m sorry, Kara.”

Kara lets the relative silence reign over them then, unsure of what to say that isn’t something teary or angry.

“When are you coming back?” Kara asks. Lena sighs, one hand coming out of her pocket and resting on the railing next to Kara’s hand.

“The minute this is done, the second he’s gone,” Lena says. “You know that.”

“Okay,” Kara says, watching the railing beneath her feet, her sister pulling her phone from her pocket and flipping it open. Lena doesn’t respond, her face sad as she reaches her hand the slightest bit further and touches Kara’s, her fingers tracing up Kara’s fingers until they bump into the ring. The heart’s point is still aimed toward her wrist, just like how Lena had slipped it on, even after Sam had oh so helpfully explained what Lena had not.

“I miss you,” Lena says, her face wide open and young. Kara could kiss her. Wants to kiss her. Can feel her phone start buzzing in her back pocket.

“The minute this is done,” Kara says, her voice musing, eyes focused on Lena’s. “You owe me this.”

“I know,” Lena says, watching as Kara pulls the phone from her pocket.

“You should go,” Kara says, and she feels Lena’s hand grip hers tight before she brushes past, sinking again into the shadows and away from her. She feels cold settle onto her skin. She answers the phone.

“Hey, where the fuck are you?” Alex asks, standing up on top of the booth beneath Kara’s feet.

“Sorry, I just got a little twisted around,” Kara says, laughing. “I’ll be right back.”

When she gets back to her seat, Alex unwraps her arm from around Sam and slides it around Kara’s shoulders, pressing in tight.

“You good?” Alex asks.

“Yeah,” Kara says. It doesn’t seem like Alex so much as believes her as she just accepts Kara isn’t going to open up about it right now. A minute later, she’s asking Sam onto the dance floor, and Kara watches them and wishes, wishes, wishes.

-

J’onn is trying to teach Kara about fairies, and Kara is thinking about the fetal pig she’s supposed to be dissecting in her intro to bio class when he throws a knife at her head.

She manages to catch it, thankfully, nearly takes the chair she’s in with it. Out in the living room, James picks his head up and throws a glance of confusion her way.

“You’re distracted,” J’onn says, reproach and lack of amusement writ large on his tone and face. Kara remembers the first time she met him, a librarian with a deep voice and a penchant for all black clothes who knew too much about her. These days, it feels like he looks at her and sees a Slayer on a frayed leash.

“Right. Sorry,” Kara says. She throws the knife past his head so that it embeds itself in a cabinet in his kitchen. He doesn’t even flinch. “Fairies. Avoid the circles, stay away from tiny folk.”

J’onn sighs, shuffling around the books and papers strewn across his kitchen table before he looks at her dead-on. Sometimes it feels like he can see right through her.

“Kara,” J’onn says.

“J’onn,” Kara says.

“I know that I’ve been very harsh to you lately,” J’onn starts. Kara sighs, shifting in her seat and thinking again about that weird little fetal pig face. Dead and formaldehyde-y. Not as awful once you cut it open, even though Winn had gagged for at least fifteen minutes of their initial lab.

“It doesn’t matter,” Kara says. J’onn shakes his head.

“It does,” J’onn says. “A Watcher’s job is to help the Slayer, not to - add to her problems. I know that you’ve thought I was pushing you too hard, or hurting you - encouraging you to send Kieran away - ”

“I’m hungry,” Kara says, standing up and heading toward the assortment of granola bars in a box on J’onn’s counter. He doesn’t bother trying to stop her, just keeps on talking, as he’s prone to.

“I know you think I was harsh,” J’onn repeats. “But a Slayer must remain focused on fighting evil. And Kieran certainly turned out to be evil, soul or no.”

“Did she? Must’ve missed that,” Kara deadpans, unpeeling the granola bar and taking a way-too-large bite.

“And I know that you think learning about things like fairies isn’t helpful to the problem before you, but you must know that I’m doing my best to prepare you,” J’onn says. “You’ll face trials larger than Lex Luthor in the future.”

“If I survive,” Kara says, around a mouthful of chocolate-infused granola. When she turns to look at J’onn, he’s looking at her seriously. “Look, I get it. With great power comes great responsibility. Lena was a bad influence, the fairies are treacherous, you care. I get all of that.”

“It seems as though you treat all of those facts flippantly,” J’onn says. “For someone in your position.”

Kara very nearly sees red, but focuses on chewing and swallowing her food. A thousand things shock through her head. She thinks about slipping the fetal pig out of its creepy plastic bag and a puddle of formaldehyde under its body in the metal tray and wanting to ask Winn if that’s what she had looked like when she was dead. Like a sleeping, shrunken thing.

“The Council is worried about you,” J’onn says. “I am too.”

“Okay,” Kara says, eventually. “You think I don’t take it seriously. Like I could be better if I just applied myself.”

“You could be the best,” J’onn says. And it’s heartwarming, in a sense. In others, it’s cold and it feels like a splinter under her nail. And she gets those a lot, because she spends too much time in her life sharpening wood.

“I could be the best at killing things,” Kara says. “I could be the best at being a soulless killing machine who does everything you and the Council wants me to do. You’re right, J’onn. I think I’m going to drop out of school and commit to living the crimefighting life. I’ll do everything perfect.”

“Kara - ”

“I _know_ what my responsibilities are,” Kara says, spits really. She can tell James has stopped what he’s doing in the living room, can hear him hovering just off the doorframe. “I know that I _died_ doing them. I know that my friends have got hurt because of me. I know what my job is. I know that it’s unfair that a bunch of old men who I’ve never met care whether I spend too much doing my calculus homework. I know that you all look at me and expect me to be perfect.”

Kara takes ahold of the knife in the side of the cabinet and tosses it into the sink, imagines one day, maybe soon, her body on a morgue table, someone with a bone saw about to crack open her chest. And they’ll bury her like she was just another person, and the stupid Council wouldn’t even send flowers.

“And I know that I have to be perfect,” Kara says. “Because if I fail, then that’s it. Until you can find whatever other fourteen year-old has superpowers and drain her of her life, too. You know, if I don’t do this because it’s the right thing to do to prevent evil or whatever, I’d do this so she doesn’t have to.”

She grabs her bio text and her backpack, ignores James’s soft _Kara_ and jumps on her shitty bike with the wobbly wheel, and peddles away.

-

“Y’know,” Sam says. “I know what you’re about.”

Kara is, at the moment, about trying to write a presentation on PTSD in the computer lab in the dark. Last she saw, Sam was on a streak of six wins at Solitaire, a mysterious and true skill that Kara wishes she had. They’re alone, thankfully - Alex is at dinner with Eliza, Winn and James are in class, J’onn is leaving her space, probably anticipating a non-forthcoming apology at any moment.

“What do you mean?” Kara asks. Sam shrugs, clicking around on her screen.

“You’re the Slayer,” Sam says, smiling widely when Kara blinks at her. “You’re trying to stop Lex Luthor from like. Killing everyone.”

“You’re gonna reveal this to me now,” Kara says, looking around the empty, dark computer lab. Sam is illuminated only by the greenish glow of her computer screen.

“Deus ex machina, I know,” Sam says, shrugging. “But I’m bored about you not knowing. I like you.”

“You like my sister more,” Kara mutters, turning back to her presentation. “When are you going to ask her out?”

“Wow,” Sam says, still smiling. She hasn’t tried to shank Kara yet, and she has been legitimately helpful with the whole tech squad help, so she feels safe assuming whatever Sam is about isn’t a bad thing. “Okay.”

“Deus ex machina, I know,” Kara spits on back. “How’d you know?”

“Incidental, really,” Sam says. She reaches for the sleeve of her shirt and pulls it up, revealing her bicep, where an intense looking Celtic knot is etched into her skin, wrapping around it. Kara looks at it with some measure of curiosity - something about it looks familiar, but not in a shitty tattoo shop way. Like it means something that she saw once in a book. “My ancestors are the ones who placed that curse on Kieran. We keep tabs.”

Kara pauses then, spins her chair to look at Sam. Sam is looking back at her with a placid expression, her shirt slipping back down her arm.

“And?” Kara settles on. Sam seems to find something about it funny, because she pitches forward in laughter, until her head almost hits the desk.

“Look, I know that you’re in love with her. I know because it’s like, sort of my job to watch her. And all she does is sleep, buy pig’s blood from this farm forty miles away, and hang out with you,” Sam says. “It’s like. Totally cool.”

Kara doesn’t even bother trying to deny it. Something about the way Sam is being and the calm of the computer lab makes her too tired, too calm.

“Is it cool?” Kara mutters, pulling over her psych casebook to check the details of John Doe’s post-war problems. 

“She killed my great-great-great-great-great grandmother,” Sam says. “I feel like, if anyone gets to say it’s cool, I do. I get the feeling that you don’t hear from a lot of people that it’s cool, you know?”

“You don’t think that she’s gone and turned back evil?” Kara asks.

“Oh, that’s completely and utterly impossible,” Sam says, waving Kara off. “Evil doesn’t exactly fit into the high-grade soul we outfitted her with. It’s brooding and angst 24/7 all-time forever. She’s doing something clever, I’m sure. She killed my grandmother by trapping her in a sort of - puzzle cave. Hard to explain. But she’s always been a smartass.”

Kara can’t help but wince.

“Has anyone ever told you that you’re a bit flippant about all this?” Kara says. She’s aware of the fact that she’s regurgitating J’onn’s sentiments at another party, but - she somewhat gets it now.

“All the time,” Sam says, shrugging. “But honestly, when you think about it, your girlfriend killed one very nice druid and we cursed her for eternity with a punishment that has no end but in death. If my mom thinks I’m wigging out approving of her having a good time fucking around with the Slayer then like - whatever. If Kieran Luthor can get past her crushing guilt long enough to get it in then I have to respect that.”

“This is a weird conversation,” Kara says. Sam nods.

“I know,” Sam says. “But I wanted you to know. That it’s okay. I can’t tell you whether things will work out re: Lex and his villainy or whether Kieran can actually function in a relationship without crying all the time, but you know. I’m your friend. You’ve got me. I know a couple druid spells, even.”

“Deus ex machina, indeed,” Kara says. “Do you know how to stop Lex Luthor from raising a demon who can end the world?”

Sam blinks at her for a few seconds.

“Well, I might have to call my mom,” Sam says. “But I can at least help you try?”

-

Sam asks Alex out while they’re all sitting in the strip mall parking lot. Winn is blasting The Beatles at maximum volume from the tinny speakers of his terrible pickup truck. There’s still praying mantis goop in some parts of the bed of the truck, but James doesn’t mind from where he’s laying. Winn is sprawled half on his chest, a forty of Miller Lite in his hand.

Kara is sitting on the roof of the truck, watching idly as Sam gesticulates wildly at Alex about fifteen feet away from them, even taking the time to pull up her shirt sleeve. She flexes way more than she did when she showed the tattoo to Kara, but whatever. It’s nice. Spring is on the air. Lex Luthor and his shitty monster of the week are taking the night off.

She knows Lena’s there without even looking. Kara’s body is a bit like a tuning fork or dowsing rods; she senses vampire or demon and she gets all sorts of like a scenthound on the hunt. But Lena is something else on the back of her tongue, soft and chocolatey. She doesn’t know if it’s the soul or how much Kara loves her; loves all the bits of her that she maybe shouldn’t, and the esoteric bits like how she likes poetry and loves math problems. Loves how she holds her and how when she kissed her for the first (only) time it was like they both forgot who and what they were.

Alex is lurching forward to kiss Sam fifteen feet away, Winn is punching James in the chest to the beat of “Twist and Shout,” and Kara turns her head to see Lena, a couple store-allotted parking lots down, leaning against her motorcycle. It might as well be a thousand miles. God, Kara wants her. Wants her right next to her, on the roof of the pickup truck, muttering the lyrics to the song and smiling when Winn picks his head up and spots Alex and Sam making out.

“Hell yeah!” Winn yells, scrambling up to his feet and punching the air. “Gay rights, bitch!”

“Shut the fuck up, Schott,” Alex returns, her hair askew and a hand suspiciously beneath the fabric of Sam’s shirt. Kara smiles, mostly at Lena. Even from this distance, she can see the return.

“I love my two moms!” Winn yells. The song switches over to “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” and truthfully, Kara feels like she could cry. Lena gives a last wave, long and hesitant, the white of her hand bright under the moon.

“I’m going to break your leg again,” Alex offers. Lena settles on her bike, unbothered by a helmet, though she had offered Kara one the few times they rode together. She drives away slowly, the rumble of the motorcycle hovering on Kara’s earwaves like a slow burn.

-

No one expects to get kidnapped in the grocery store, she’s pretty sure. But all the same, that’s how it happens: she’s grabbing a bag of Funyuns on a late night study run from the top shelf (less crushing and touching), and then a voice is growling in her ear.

“If you make a noise, we’ll kill your friend,” says the voice. Kara can see Sam looking through an assortment of chicken nuggets down ( _If there aren’t any dino nuggets, I’m committing_ ) in the frozen section at the end of Kara’s aisle, a figure who sets off all of Kara’s alarm bells a few feet away. When Kara turns, it’s the woman who she saw in the warehouse with Lena and Lex.

“Is this like, negotiable at all?” Kara asks. “Because I don’t want to.”

The person down the aisle from Sam takes one step closer, and even from here, Kara can feel the heavy icky feeling of them. She sighs, steels herself for whatever fresh hell Lex has cooked up for her. Tries to trust in Lena.

“Fine. But I’m taking the Funyuns.”

They lock her hands together with heavy gauntlets when they get her in the car, awful looking writing all up and down them. The shape of the symbols rings a bell; infernal, maybe, but it maybe doesn’t matter. She can’t pick up her hands against their weight. The Funyuns dangle uselessly in her hands.

-

“Slayer,” Lex greets, when Kara is yanked out of the car. They’re in a new abandoned warehouse, thankfully with no hanging cars or obvious functioning electricity. Lena is skulking in the background. There’s a chair without a person in it that Kara divines will be hers in only moments.

“Lex,” Kara says, getting pulled toward the chair by the blonde woman who had talked in her ear and pushed by the creepy murder man who had been menacing Sam. “I like the new place.”

“You amuse me,” Lex says. He says this as though he is playing at being a King of a medieval court and she is a very boring jester who he is about to behead. The gauntlets on Kara’s hand and smack hard into her thighs when she gets put in the chair. “Certainly the most fun I’ve had with a Slayer in centuries.”

“Can someone feed me my Funyuns?” Kara asks, dropping the bag in her hand and sort of trying to kick it in the blonde’s direction. “I’m starving.”

“Let me ask you something, Slayer,” Lex says, leaning into her face and cocking his head. “In all that time you spent being enamored with my sister, did she tell you about the time she helped me kill a Slayer?”

“Enamored is a strong term,” Kara returns, even though she can feel the ring on her finger. “And sure. She’s a big fan of the story. The blood raining down from the ceiling. Very sexy murder times.”

“Me too,” Lex says, nodding appreciatively, glancing over to wherever Lena is to Kara’s right. “My favorite part is how she seduced the woman first. She forced Eve and I to listen to them for hours, if I recall. Do you remember that, Eve?”

The blonde laughs as though it is an amusing memory. Kara is not particularly amused by it, in numerous contexts.

“Of course I do,” Eve says. “Her blood was still hot.”

The intimations one could make on that one statement are disgusting. Kara thinks about puking.

“Did Kieran tell you about that?” Lex asks, kneeling in front of Kara now. Kara wants to pick up her joined hands and smash them into his nose, but her hands won’t even budge. Concerning business, as ever.

“Sure,” Kara says. “Sexual conquests were our favorite conversation topic.”

Lex’s face settles into a solid form. Kara gets the feeling that she’s done wrong by not playing into his little game of jealousy. She can feel Lena shift behind her as Lex snaps his fingers and the man presses something into his hand.

“My sister has always been the nicer of the two of us,” Lex says. “Even when she was vicious. It’s hard to know exactly, but that Slayer certainly felt as much pleasure as she ever had in her life before we drank her blood.”

“So, virgin blood _isn’t_ the best tasting then,” Kara says, nodding as Lex unfolds his hand to reveal a crystal, sharpened on one end, clear and green. It looks almost like emerald, but Kara’s eyes are stuck to it almost immediately, like she can’t look away. It sets her skin crawling. Lex laughs.

“Of course not,” Lex says. “Slayer blood is.”

And then he takes the spindly end of the crystal and slips it straight beneath the skin of her forearm, exposed as it is under the weight of the gauntlets.

It lights her on _fire._

Kara is not invincible in the least - considering how often she’s been whipped around in the last few months, she feels like she could really be _more_ invincible. But it’s also true that she’s stronger than regular humans. Stronger than most vampires, even. She carries around pointy objects all day, tries flipping them for style way too often, according to J’onn, and has had many a sharp point enter her bubble and bounce off her harmlessly. But whatever this crystal is sinks into her as simply as a stone in water, and it burns worse than any wound she’s ever had.

She screams, tries to kick out her legs, but she can’t move - can’t move - can’t breathe -

Her eyes are barely open enough to see Lex draw a finger over the initial wound and bring it to his mouth. The smile on his face is red-tinted when he hums.

“As good as I remember it,” he says, turning away as Kara keeps screaming, and she can sort of see the man handing something else to him, another sharp, pointy thing. He kneels in front of her again. “You know, while Kieran was having her fun, I had mine. I cut off every finger of that Slayer’s Watcher until he told me everything he knew about the Council and the Slayers and how best to kill you all.”

Lex reaches out to press the crystal deeper into her skin. Kara can see webs of green fall off it, spreading up her arm, and waves of pain and pain and pain seep through her. She screams again, and Lex - laughs.

“This is a tool the Council uses to depower you Slayers,” Lex says. “Although, judging by this reaction, I can’t imagine they stab you with it. I must have misinterpreted.”

He reaches out and punches her in the face, and she feels her nose just - absolutely burst, her glasses crack and fall. When she was eight, she had fallen out of tree and onto her driveway and broken it on the concrete, but this is worse - her whole face burns and burns, blood flowing freely. He pulls his hand away and sucks at his knuckles, stepping back again, tossing the sharp thing in his hand.

“Come taste, Kieran,” Lex says, his voice soft amidst the throbbing in Kara’s face and in her veins and _everything,_ God, everything hurts. “She’s delicious.”

Kara has lost all trace of Lena’s presence in the room, and the weight of the gauntlets in her lap is digging in now, heavy and hard. Her powers are well and truly gone.

She feels Lena’s hand on the back of her neck first, fingers too-strong and too-tight. The weight of the grip crunches her head forward, and Kara watches as blood starts dripping steadily onto her hands and lap, and she watches as the green thing in her arm glows and pulses. Lena’s fingers sift into the hair at the nape of her neck, and Lena is all of a sudden in her view, picking her head up and looking at her.

Lena’s fangs are out, mouth open, her eyes trained on the blood coming out of Kara’s nose, covering her lips and dripping down her neck.

Kara, for the first time since she felt those fangs on her lips the first (only) time they kissed, feels real, true fear about what Lena is and is capable of. Her eyes are yellowish, and focused steadily on her. For the first time, Kara gets the heavy feeling that this might really be her end. Kidnapped from the grocery store, for fuck’s sake.

She can’t even beg. She’s in so much pain, and it’s only made worse when Eve leans in from the left, pressing down on the crystal in her arm and digging it deeper into her muscle. Kara full on screams in Lena’s face, is pretty sure she’s too nauseous to puke, but can feel her stomach roiling.

“If you won’t taste, I will,” Eve says, voice lilting as her face comes closer to Kara. Kara’s eyes slip shut. It never contacts though, a cracking sound coming close to her, and a loud snarl, followed by a laugh.

“Oh, Kieran,” Lex says, and Kara tries to open her eyes again. There’s something dark in front of her - and it takes a second, but Kara realizes it’s Lena. “You’ll kill her either way. It might as well be with your brother instead of without.”

Lena’s hand is on Kara’s wrist, slipping up to grip the end of the crystal still sticking out from Kara’s skin. She gets one minute second of warning brought on by realization before Lena is sliding it free. She absolutely screams again, but immediately - she feels her nose start to knit back together, feels herself able to pick up her hands again.

“You’re a monster, Lex,” Lena says, her voice shaky as she launches the crystal away from Kara, and Kara can hear it shattering in the distance. Lena is tugging her up from the chair by the gauntlets still on her wrists, urging her backwards, her body between Kara and the rest of the vamps.

“Sure,” Lex returns. “But you’re a traitor.”

Lex lunges forward, and Lena turns and grabs for Kara, pushing her into a full sprint toward the back of the warehouse.

Kara is fast, has been able to outrun plenty of speed demons before, but she’s still recovering from - whatever crystal that was, still feels like it might be better if she stopped and puked her guts up. Lena is mostly dragging her along at high speeds as they burst out a door and onto a street. Kara can just glimpse Lena’s motorcycle parked down the street when Lex wraps an arm around Kara’s waist and throws her into a brick wall.

Kara hits hard enough that one of the gauntlets on her wrist snaps on her fall to the concrete, but Lena steps in front of her again, her form somehow imposing. But it looks like exactly what Lex wanted, judging by the grin on his face. And that’s when Kara sees he’s still carrying whatever pointy thing the man vampire had been holding.

Lex strides forward and stabs Lena with little fanfare - it jabs into her shoulder and she lets out a loud snarl before she stumbles back, into Kara, who catches her before she hits the ground. Lex presses his advantage, driving his new stabbing weapon deeper into Lena’s skin.

“If you want her so badly, than that’s all that can save you,” Lex says. “Goodbye, sister.”

He shoves until Lena stumbles back again, falling to the ground, Kara with her. She looks pale, paler than usual - almost blue.

“Slayer,” Lex says, panting, blood on his cheeks. Kara tries to stand, pulling at Lena’s body until she’s up. “The next time I see you, I will kill you. No more games.”

He turns and walks away, but Kara could honestly give a shit. Lena is leaning heavily against her, gasping even though she has no need to, and Kara honestly feels like dying right now and taking away the chance from Lex.

When she pulls the sharp piece of - metal, it seems - from Lena’s shoulder, it’s slippery with a silvery substance.

“That’s poison,” Lena rasps. “I made it, once. A good joke.”

Then Lena passes out.

-

Kara learns a lot of things in the next fifteen minutes. One is that driving a motorcycle is hard, and it’s even harder when you’re trying to support another being who is mostly unconscious. Two is that Lena’s apartment is less sparse than Kara had anticipated.

“Tell me how to help you,” Kara says, hoisting Lena into a chair with a funny floral print on it. There are four bookcases packed into the small studio, a massive bed taking up most of the room. Dust springs up when Kara starts yanking off Lena’s coat to get a closer look at the wound on her shoulder.

Lena is laughing, has been laughing in just about every moment of waning consciousness for the last fifteen minutes.

“Lena,” Kara says, grabbing ahold of Lena’s cheeks and squeezing, trying to get the woman to focus on her. “Lena, tell me how to save you.”

“Can’t,” Lena says, shrugging and laughing. She’s sweating, somehow, slick with it. The wound is open, oozing silver-red. Kara feels like she might panic out of her skin, feels shaky from blood loss and general extreme stress. She isn’t even sure she turned off Lena’s motorcycle correctly.

“Shut up,” Kara hisses. “What’s the antidote?”

“Blood,” Lena says, her green eyes lidded but focused on Kara. “You’re beautiful.”

“Don’t,” Kara says. “You need blood? I can get you blood.”

She goes off into the kitchen, and sure, the jars of blood in the fridge look pretty thick, but she shakes them and comes back, and Lena’s shaking her head back and forth.

“No,” Lena says. “Just leave, Kara.”

“I won’t leave you,” Kara says, grabbing ahold of Lena’s neck and tilting her head forward to settle against the rim of the jar. She can tell how weak Lena is just by how easily she folds under the touch. “Drink.”

“Not it,” Lena says, a smile on her face. Blood from the jar gets on her teeth. Kara thinks about dumping it on Lena’s head, but decides that dramatics are best saved for the saving of lives, and sets the jar on the windowsill behind the chair. Kara is half in Lena’s lap, half kneeling in front of her.

“Tell me how to help you,” Kara says. “Lena. Please.”

“You should leave,” Lena says, her head lolling backward when Kara lets it go. “Let me be.”

“Lex said that I was all that could save you,” Kara says, pulling away from Lena and pacing back and forth in front of her. All around the room are books upon books, dusty with disuse and the bed and that’s it. No chemistry sets with specific antidote instructions. “What the fuck does that mean?”

“I love you,” Lena says, voice soft. Kara spins back around, grabbing ahold of the collar of Lena’s sweater and yanking until Lena picks up from the back of the chair.

“If you love me, tell me how to save you,” Kara says, practically yells. She really hopes Lena’s neighbors are out or just - not here.

“No,” Lena says, stubborn as hell. “I won’t take it.”

“Take what?” Kara yelps, both hands gripping ahold of Lena’s collar. “Take what, Lena?”

“It’s okay,” Lena says, smile on her face as she looks at Kara. Kara realizes that she’s crying, of course, because why not - why not cry some more tonight. It makes her so mad and all she wants to do is beat Lena’s brains in until she tells Kara what to do - how to save her. But Lena is smiling soft at her.

Kara kisses her, and Lena sinks into it simple as anything. Their lips slip-slide together, probably because Lena is sweating and Kara is crying and probably still has blood coming out of her nose. But it’s amazing, stupid amazing, and Lena’s hands land on Kara’s hips, and Kara sinks one knee between Lena’s legs. When Lena’s tongue slips between Kara’s lips, Lena hums, loud, and her hands grip tight enough that Kara jolts away.

When she opens her eyes, Lena’s eyes are yellow, focused again on Kara’s lips, and she’s breathing heavy, her lungs soaking up air they don’t need. And Kara sees the trickle of blood and silver on her shoulder slow.

Oh, Jesus Christ on a cracker.

“How much do you need?” Kara pants, thumbing at the space underneath her nose and feeling dried and clumped bits of blood come away. Lena watches her hand for a second, sweat pooling in the moonlight on her brow.

“No,” Lena says, her body pressing back and her hands shaking as she grips the chair. “I won’t.”

“Lena,” Kara says, trying to grab for Lena’s hands, but Lena jerks away, slipping out of the chair and mostly succeeding in falling to the ground for a second before scrambling up.

“No,” Lena says. “I could kill you.”

“I won’t let you die when I could save you,” Kara says, following Lena across the tiny room. “Lena, please.”

“No,” Lena says. “Kara, just go.”

“I won’t,” Kara says, and she tilts her head to one side and back the slightest bit. It’s exactly the position that J’onn is always saying is the worst case scenario. But she doesn’t feel threatened. “You know I won’t.”

“Kara,” Lena says, her voice low and aching and Kara feels it deep in her gut in a way that maybe she shouldn’t, but she does. She reaches for the fabric of Lena’s sweater again, pulling and pulling until Lena’s body stumbles into hers. She doesn’t mistake the hold Lena places on her hips. “Kara.”

“I love you,” Kara says. And she makes sure she looks at Lena, makes sure every inch of eye contact is made, makes sure that Lena feels it. “I trust you.”

Lena’s lips are on hers for one, long, firm moment, harsh and demanding and hot and overwhelming. Kara whines into it almost, feels her hips jerk under Lena’s hands, feels her own hands grip ahold of the hem of Lena’s sweater.

And then her lips are on Kara’s neck. And then her teeth, grazing. And then they sink in.

-

Truthfully, Kara’s thought about this before.

She feels lightheaded. This makes sense; blood is being drawn from her body rapidly. But there’s also Lena’s body pressing against hers, tight, until Kara falls backwards, and they’re on the bed, and then Lena is on top of her, really.

Kara knows how this works. She’s studied it. She knows how the vampire is built to extinguish life in mere minutes, how they create new vampires, how they can make the experience any sort of thing.

Damn it all to hell, whether it’s drugs or not, Kara feels loved. Lena is gentle, her body soft, her tongue mixing in and out against the divot her teeth have created on Kara’s neck. And Lena’s hands are under her head, on her waist, and Kara’s shirt has ridden up, and so Lena’s hands are on her skin and she feels all sorts of different on fire than she had less than an hour ago.

Kara hardly notices slipping her hand under Lena’s sweater and digging her fingernails into Lena’s back, her fingers slipping over the fabric of Lena’s bra. Every little boundary between them breaks down and it all falls on top of each other like an avalanche. Kara digs her nails in and whines; Lena moans into Kara’s neck; Kara’s hips jump up, and then Lena is rolling over, sitting up, and Kara is straddling her now, her hips pressing down and down and Lena’s hand is at the small of her back supporting her as her body tips back. And the hot feeling inside Kara is like something intimately familiar and deeply dissonant to her at the same time, like she can feel Lena on the other end of it, tugging and tugging, wanting and wanting.

“Fuck,” Kara whispers, somehow, from somewhere inside her brain. It’s mysterious to her, honestly, and worth it, because Lena moans again and her hips jump up into Kara’s right as Kara presses down and then Kara just - cannot breathe, can feel this new exciting terrifying awful good thing barreling at her like a lookalike orgasm freight train.

Her hand reaches out and manages to grab ahold of the top bedpost of Lena’s bed, just in time for -

Lena’s grip on her head tightens, her hand on Kara’s lower back presses down, and Kara feels the bedpost snap in her grip as she feels absolute earthshattering bliss rock down through her body. Lena moans against her neck as Kara lets out something amounting to a yell. When Lena withdraws from her neck, her tongue tracing the bite mark, Kara’s hips push down in an aftershock that ripples through her hard.

It’s the most fucked up, amazing evolutionary trait no one ever told her a vampire had. She passes out the minute Lena pulls her mouth away from her neck.

-

She wakes up face down on the bed, Lena’s snores in her left ear. They are both mysteriously, miraculously alive, and no police or Lex Luthor or Alex Danvers have beat down the door looking for her. Really, she should call Alex. She really should.

When she picks up her head and looks to her left, Lena is on her side, one hand extended in the space between them, bumping just slightly into Kara’s ribs. Kara falls back asleep.

When she wakes up the second time, Lena is sitting in the armchair, reading a book. Kara stirs, and Lena pretty much jumps, her body shocking to attention. Kara blinks at her blearily for a few seconds, before she drops back to the pillows under her head.

“Come back to bed,” Kara says, patting the empty space next to her. Lena does not move.

“I’m so sorry, Kara,” Lena says, instead, her voice all kinds of tortured.

“Don’t be sorry,” Kara says, picking up her head again and patting more forcefully at her side.

“I could have killed you,” Lena says. “You could have died. Because of me. Because of what I am.”

“You would have died if you hadn’t had me,” Kara says, and even though the turn of phrase she’s picked is maybe a little too suggestive, she bullrushes past it. “There was no other option. Come back to bed.”

Lena watches her for a few seconds more before she slowly sinks onto the bed, her hands reaching for Kara. They wind close together, Kara settling into the feeling of Lena’s body against hers. It feels so good she could die.

-

“Holy fucking shitballs,” is how Alex greets Kara. Followed immediately by a tackle, one that knocks Kara into Lena’s frame behind her. She feels Lena’s hand on the small of her back, supporting her. “Holy fucking shit, are you okay? Sam said she turned around and you were gone.”

“Attest,” Sam says, standing five feet back and wearing sunglasses, even though it’s almost midnight and they’re in the parking lot outside Kara’s dorm. Kara had called exactly three minutes ago, just before she hopped on the back of Lena’s bike. And Sam is wearing pajamas that Kara is fairly certain she bought Alex for Hanukkah four years ago. Winn and James are sprinting across the quad, also. For some reason, Winn is carrying a handheld satellite with headphones attached.

“Some things happened,” Kara says. “I got kidnapped. But I’m good now.”

“Look, I’m going to assume that you know Lena is behind you, right?” Alex asks. Kara nods, hovering still in front of Lena. Winn skids up so hard that he ends up losing balance, knocking straight into the three of them.

“Oh shit,” Winn says, his head knocking hard into Kara’s as he wraps his arms around Alex and Kara, laughing. “Kara, you know Lena is here, right?”

-

They meet with J’onn in his backyard. Because he won’t let Lena in his house.

“I got kidnapped,” Kara says. “And then Lex stabbed me. And punched me in the face. And then Lena saved me, and then he stabbed Lena. And now we’re all here and it’s totally good except for the part where he’s like, totally evil and summoning a demon to end the world.”

J’onn is staring daggers at Lena, who is sitting placidly at Kara’s side, rather close, her legs extended and her thigh lightly brushing Kara’s knee.

“Cool,” Sam says. Winn nods in agreement. James seems to be siding with J’onn on the whole glaring thing. Sam leans over and pats Alex’s leg. “Told you the soul was permastuck. No returns under any circumstances. All good things.”

“Why did you choose to assist Lex at all?” J’onn asks. Lena shifts a little, picking grass off her leg. She’s been forced out of her usual coat on account of it having a massive rip in it, and is wearing a black long-sleeve shirt Kara had found in her mono-black closet.

“I thought I could find a way to prevent his plans,” Lena says. “I thought I’d have more time.”

“You threw Alex off a balcony,” James says.

“Into a bush,” Lena, Kara, and Alex all say at the same time. They all look at each other for a funny few seconds. Lena finally repeats it again. “Into a bush. I tried my best not to hurt her.”

“And we’re meant to trust you?” J’onn asks. He’s the only one of them sitting in a chair, a low lawn one that just brings him a foot or so off the ground.

“I trust her,” Kara says, strong and true.

-

“So, you want me to not bring up how you’re wearing a turtleneck?” Sam asks, very casually. Lena and Alex are talking to each other up ahead, and Winn and James have already headed back to their dorm.

“So, you want me to not bring up how the pattern on your pajamas is the name Alex over and over again in Hebrew?” Kara returns, watching as Alex starts miming something that involves a repeated stabbing motion and Lena nods along.

“Touche,” Sam says, voice high.

-

J’onn has her meditating. Meditation is bullshit, she’s pretty sure, but she does it, sitting in the lawn chair in his backyard at night while Alex, James, and Lena spar and while J’onn, Sam, and Winn flip through books upon books, trying to find a ritual to prevent the rise of a monster named Cadmus.

“Wisdom can be found in silence,” J’onn had said, very seriously. So she meditates, expecting nothing more than what she’s experienced before - flashes of nothingness, faceless blurs, murmured voices.

(“It’s a demon capable of swallowing cities and sending them into Hell,” Lena says.

“Very cool,” Sam says, nodding up and down. “Cool. Cool.”

“Why would Lex be interested in destroying swaths of the world?” J’onn asks. He’s looking at Lena very seriously, and Kara does not mistake how many times he seems to notice the way Kara’s arm is thrown around the back of Lena’s chair.

“Power,” Lena says. “Control. He can become the new Master if he has something like that under his thumb. He just wants - the world to bend under his will. When people don’t, he kills them. It’s as simple as that.”

“Love the fascist overtones,” Alex says.)

Her friends are around her, a whirling dervish of activity where she sits in the middle. It’s warm, calming, and good - hearing Lena and Alex mutter at each other, hearing Sam repeatedly tell Winn to stop getting pizza grease on the sacred texts. The world feels very far, far away from her. The sounds of her friends around her drift in and out. But when she really comes free from reality, she feels more than hears a pop in her ear.

The visions she’s sucked through are numerous. J’onn, panting, his eyes glowing red red as he holds a gun at a man’s throat. James yelling at Winn to drive faster while Sam screams on the seat next to Kara. Alex crashing her bicycle into a tree on a boring suburban street. A woman with all-black eyes saying _you have no choice, Slayer_ in the basement of Eliza’s house. Lena turning to look at Kara, her face illuminated by the sun. A young boy picking up a toy truck in a living room and throwing it through a wall, followed by James’s exhausted voice saying _I wish weird shit would stop happening to us._ Lex Luthor standing in the middle of the Midvale High School gym, a sword at her throat. A woman running through a cave system, pounding on the stone walls. An enormous phantasmic portal, a hundred yards below Kara’s feet. A voice recording saying _Welcome to Cleveland Hopkins International Airport._ Kara’s hand wrapped around a pale wrist, pressing downward. A scream, a laugh. A gleaming red axe.

A woman standing in the desert, watching Kara, raising one fist, her eyes an all-over white hot orange color. Her voice magnetic and a thousand wide: _You are at a crossroads of a hundred thousand lives._ Kara dying. Eliza reaching out to hug her. Kara standing in a church, a strange language humming around her. A field of massive green. Alex, yelling, _Kara, you’ve got this!_ Her parents and aunts and uncles in the rain, standing up against a hillside, a car tumbling just past them. It hits her full-on, and when she opens her eyes, she’s lying on the grass outside J’onn’s house, her friends gathered up above her.

“You okay?” Alex asks, after a second. Kara breathes in deep before she nods. She sort of feels like she’s run a marathon.

“I’m good,” Kara says. Mysteriously, it feels like she is.

-

The night before they confront Lex, Final Battle style, Kara finds herself reclining on the doorstep of Lena’s apartment building, watching the sky. She had gone out to have one nervy drink with her friends, had hugged Alex fiercely and promised to meet up the next night right on time. Sam had hugged her too, whispered something about using protection.

“I thought you’d be with your friends,” Lena says, interrupting Kara’s staring at the stars. She picks her head up and finds Lena in a new coat, leather and short. She’s standing at least four feet away, her hands in her pockets.

“Can I ask you a question?” Kara asks, ignoring Lena’s rampant belief that she does not rate at the level of Kara’s friends and family.

Lena pauses and then nods.

“Can I come upstairs?” Kara asks. Lena laughs a little, looking down the street and then back at Kara.

“Should we talk more about how I almost killed you a few days ago first?” Lena asks, her hands digging deeper into her pockets as she pulls her coat tighter to her body. Kara sighs, kicks out her legs until they bump against the toe of Lena’s boots.

“I feel like maybe you should get around to thanking me for saving your life,” Kara says airily. “Who creates a poison that can only be cured with Slayer’s blood?”

“A masochist, maybe,” Lena says, shrugging and smiling. “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to hurt you.”

“I think it’s maybe obvious to the both of us that you didn’t exactly hurt me,” Kara says, reaching up to rub at her now-healed neck. It sends a rolling heat down her body like it has every time it’s been so much as brushed. Lena’s eyes follow the movement with interest that Kara feels right in the center of her body.

“Right,” Lena says. “It’s monstrous, is what it was. I could have killed you, and you would have liked it.”

Kara rolls her eyes, clambering up to her feet and closing some of the distance between them.

“You didn’t kill me,” Kara says. “Just like how I haven’t killed you even though it’s like, my birthright.”

“You should,” Lena says, softly. “I’d deserve it.”

“Okay, I’m over that,” Kara says, waving her hand around. “It’s not about deserve. I deserve a life where I can take a bio test without worrying whether I’m going to get murdered in the middle of it. You deserved a life in Ireland without a shitty brother. My parents deserved to live. So like, when you think about it - does anything really matter?”

“I’m not sure where this nihilism is going to take us,” Lena says, a smile quirking her face. Kara steps a little bit closer.

“It’s taking me upstairs,” Kara says. “Because I’m over it. If life is just going to be one enormous neverending clusterfuck then I think we should just be able to forgive each other, keep trying to do the right thing and keep going. Onward. Upward. Upstairs to your apartment, even.”

“That turned out more positive than I thought it would,” Lena says. Her smile is nearly glowing on a starry, moonless night. Kara wants her down to the tips of her toes. “Okay.”

-

Kara wakes up at around one o’clock the next day, while Lena is still sleeping. Her hair is a mess across her pillow, her skin pale in the grimdark of her apartment. The blackout curtains on the window are working their hardest to keep the light out. There are a thousand things Kara is thinking about, many of them world-altering things.

But she’s also thinking about kissing every inch of Lena’s skin, and the yield of it beneath Kara’s hands. How good it felt to hear Lena whisper her name in the dark, into her ear. How good it felt to feel Lena, how wet she was, for Kara, how it felt like the whole world slipped away, and it was just them. How Lena played a nerdy cool party trick and recited random lines from “Song of Myself” into Kara’s ear while she did something downright absurd with her fingers. How Kara had kissed her, how Lena had whispered _I love you. I love you. I love you._

It’s self-aggrandizing to think it, but Kara was right, last night, even though she had mostly been talking her way into bed: the moments where you let the world stop turning, for just a second, are the ones that help you keep going when it inevitably starts spinning again. Kara is fairly certain she’d kill a thousand demons every day forever (a likely prospect, if she survives tonight) just to know she could have this, even a little.

-

They find Lex, as anticipated, in the high school’s cafeteria, trying to raise Cadmus. Their plan is a) haphazard and b) multilayered. J’onn, James, Lena, and Alex are all dressed and outfitted to fight. Alex has no less than four water guns full of Holy Water attached to her person, the nutjob. James has on his football pads and helmet, carrying Kara’s third favorite stake. J’onn is carrying more stakes, and Lena is carrying one too, after Kara had forced one into her hands.

Elsewhere in the school, Sam and Winn are working to do a magical counterspell thing just in case Kara can’t just stop the ritual before it’s begun. They had dropped the two of them off with no less than four grocery bags full of weird, weird shit, including a headless bat that Lena had been coerced into retrieving and beheading.

“Slayer,” Lex says. He’s standing over a large hole dug in the ground through the tile of the floor, a fancy old book in his hands, a sword on his belt that’s mismatched completely with his suit. “Ah, I see. You’ve managed to keep my sister alive.”

“Called an audible on you,” Kara says, shrugging. Alex actually groans out loud at that one. Lex smiles.

“I look forward to killing you,” Lex says, and then he reaches out and snaps his fingers.

Several things happen at once: Eve, the blonde vampire, the man vampire whose name Kara still doesn’t know, and five others come from all sides. And a thunderous noise comes from below them. The ground beneath their feet begins rippling up, almost like an enormous gopher is tunneling there. There’s a loud crashing noise from behind when windows shatter in the cafeteria’s courtyard, and Kara can hear yells and shouts around the building.

“Uh, I think we’ve got trouble,” comes Winn’s voice, crackling over the walkie-talkie watch he had promised would be able to hold up even if they were crosstown from each other. A loud howl comes over his background noise.

The vamps descend on James, Alex, J’onn and Lena all around her, but Lex is left for her. He charges. She manages to dodge him initially, cracking him in the knee as he passes. When he scrambles back to his feet, though, he’s grinning.

She gets launched through the courtyard window, and into the large tree she had used to sit under with Alex and Winn and complain about English class. It’s there that he lifts her up and pins her to the tree, pulling a shard of -

Kara’s screaming even before he snaps the green crystal in her thigh, can feel her whole body go slow motion. The fights going on behind Lex all freeze; but Lex’s side recovers faster: J’onn gets thrown into a collection of tables, Alex takes a whopper to the face. Lena and James are already out of Kara’s frame of view, and she can’t hear them, can’t hear anything.

Lex drops her and her leg buckles when she tries to land. Blood is seeping out from her thigh under her jeans, and she can feel it burning underneath her skin, burning, burning, but she can’t get it out of her without - cutting it out maybe, but she can’t -

He kicks her in the jaw.

“Get up, Slayer,” Lex says, even as she tries to sway to her feet, her ears ringing and jaw clicking. “Get up and run.”

Somehow, she does.

-

She feels like Ellie in _Jurassic Park,_ hobbling through the dark corridors of the high school on a bum leg, crashing into everything and bleeding everywhere. Lex is following after her, and Kara keeps getting bits of radio static that she can’t keep track of - she feels like she can’t think, really. Every few moments, Lex catches her, and she punches him and it feels like her knuckles shatter, and then he punches her and it feels like she’s dying.

Lex takes her down a stairwell, rolls her until he cracks her head into the pavement.

“You Slayers,” he says, getting up off the ground and watching her as she tries to get up again, tries to breathe around the pain ricocheting around her body. “Why not just stay down? It could all be over.”

And that sounds nice, in a certain way. Kara crashes headfirst into the boy’s locker room by the basketball courts, manages to hit Lex with a broom she finds right inside the door. It snaps right there on his face, and he grabs her by the arm and throws her into a bay of lockers.

“You think you have something to live for?” Lex asks, laughing when Kara climbs up out of the hole left by her body and falls directly onto the locker room bench and then onto the floor. She slides in the mess of her own blood, really. “I’ve lived for hundreds of years. I’ve killed four of you. I know that you have nothing to live for.”

She’s crawling now, pulling herself up in degrees until she can crash out the door onto the basketball court.

“Your friends will die, or hate you,” Lex says. “Your Watcher and Council will kill you.”

Kara spits blood on the ground as the floorboards of the gym ripple, dirt and concrete peeking through. Someone is shouting on her walkie-talkie. But all she can hear is Lex, all she can feel is the blood coursing out of her and how badly she just wants to rest - how much she wants to stop.

“You think you have my sister,” Lex spits, and he’s reaching into his belt to grab the sword hung there. It shines in the lights of the gym. “This sword belonged to the last Slayer I killed. It adds a bit of drama, killing the next with the favored weapon of the former.”

“Is this not enough drama?” Kara asks, still holding the snapped end of the broom and trying to gather enough, enough to keep standing. Keep going.

“Think carefully on your last words, Slayer,” Lex says, and a massive roar comes sounding from just beneath their feet, the ground rumbling so hard that Kara on her one-and-a-half legs falls again, and she contemplates the gym ceiling from the ground, feeling the hardwood beneath her buckle and rise. Winn and Sam failed; Alex is probably dead, and so are James and J’onn and Lena. She’s alone, alone, alone. “I’ll make sure to share them with your successor.”

Kara tries to roll away, the feeling in her leg with the crystal all but gone.

“What do you think of death, Slayer?” Lex asks, his voice casual as he reaches down and cranks her ankle until it cracks and she turns back over. His sword is at her throat. “The others, they had accepted it. I saw it in their eyes. Do you fear it? Or do you wish for it, too?”

A scream sounds through the gym, louder than Kara’s ever heard, and the rumbling beneath her stops abruptly. It’s almost deathly quiet but for her breathing, Lex’s face freezing as he turns to look at the large area of the gym where dirt has been pushed up through the ground.

“No,” he says, just as Kara’s watch crackles with Winn yelling, happy and excited. Her leg throbs and throbs and her heart warms. “No!”

Kara manages to get to one knee long enough to stake him through the heart when he turns around. It’s almost like his body has to take a moment to process it, his eyes dropping to the broom handle embedded in his chest. Kara smiles, feels blood pool out of her mouth.

“I’m not afraid,” Kara says, and then digs deeper.

He dusts. And she hits the ground hard, the gross remains drifting all around her.

She lies there for what feels like hours, but it can't be more than minutes. She can only vaguely hear the radio on her wrist, but there sure is a lot of chatter. There's a loud crash that she can sort of track as being nearby, and she tries to struggle up to her knees at the least, grabbing for the snapped handle and holding it just barely aloft. 

But when she manages to focus, it's just Alex, and Lena, barrelling into the gym. When she realizes that it's okay, that they're okay, that she's okay, she feels all manner of fight leave her. She hits the gym floor face down, hearing a loud shout of, “Kara!” before she passes out.

-

While J’onn claims repeatedly that he and Alex had managed to get all the pieces of the special green crystal - _it’s called Kryptonite,_ he had said, when Lena had pinned him to the wall of his apartment hard enough that his collection of war medals fell to the ground - out of her, sometimes her leg locks up, even months later.

“I’m clocking out,” she says to Imra, the new manager at the movie theatre. Imra waves from where she’s sitting in the office, doesn’t even bother to turn around. The new guy, Q, looks up from the book he’s reading about alien conspiracy theories - and makes a face approximating a smile. Kara’s pretty sure he’s like, an alien or something, and still hasn’t quite figured out how smiling works.

“Be careful, Miss Danvers,” he says. “Last I saw, it was getting quite dark.”

“Not one of my fears, but thanks for the heads up,” Kara says, grabbing her keys and wallet from her locker and slinging her backpack onto her shoulders. If Q notices the clinking of bottles and mysterious movement of wooden items, he doesn’t acknowledge it.

When she gets outside, Lena is leaning up against her motorcycle with two styrofoam cups in her hands. The one she’s sipping looks sort of like cherry soda, except that Kara knows for certain that it is not.

The one she extends towards Kara is cold, and deliciously chocolatey when Kara manages to suck the milkshake up the straw. She very nearly passes out from pleasure at the taste after being trapped in the dark projection rooms all day fighting with their equipment.

“This is amazing,” Kara moans, dropping her bag on the seat of the motorcycle and nearly crying. “I deserved this.”

“You’d think it would stop shocking me at some point how you react to the same milkshake every Friday night,” Lena says, sipping her own drink. “Sam wants to know if we want to go to Alien Bar with her and Alex and the guys tonight.”

“Do I _want_ to watch my sister and her girlfriend grind on each other for three hours before I inevitably puke?” Kara asks. Lena laughs. “We could just. You know.”

“Sam said she’d buy all our drinks,” Lena says. “And that we could leave after an hour.”

“Why do you and Sam talk now?” Kara whines, adjusting her straw’s placement in her milkshake. “You’re supposed to be mortal enemies. Her ancestors cursed you with a torturous soul.”

“Life never goes how you expect it to,” Lena says, shrugging. Kara leans forward until her legs are bumping into Lena’s. Lena looks down at it immediately, completely distracted as ever. By the time Lena manages to look up again, Kara is leaning forward to press a kiss to her mouth.

Making out in the parking lot in front of your place of work is inadvisable, Kara’s sure. But it just - keeps happening. Maybe there’s just nothing she can do about it.

“You’re all bloody,” Kara says, mostly against Lena’s lips. Lena hums, her arms draping around Kara’s shoulders.

This is when numerous patrons come screaming out of the aquarium store across the parking lot from the movie theatre, pursued by a group of large, slimy-looking fish people spitting out jets of water that look about as strong as a firehose. A woman gets taken down immediately, skidding on the pavement.

Kara sighs. Reaches for her very scuffed watch, presses down the _talk_ button.

“Fish people at the movie theatre,” Kara says. Responses crackle in from down the line, ranging from _is this a trivia question_ to _are you sleep walkie-ing_ to _10-4, on my way._ Lena is looking up at Kara softly, almost sweetly if it weren’t for the wry grin on her face.

“I love you,” she says. And it gives her enough strength to go sprinting for the fish men, and it powers her through when she ends up getting swallowed by one and then cut out of it by a laughing J’onn and James.

-

Into every generation a Slayer is born and the truth is that it sucks. But it sucks less than you’d think, if you’ve got people to help you through. There are a billion hundred thousand things Kara Danvers has done and will do that she never thought she could or would - but she did them and will do them. This hour I tell things in confidence: Keep going. Onward and upward.

**Author's Note:**

> If you want, you can come say hi to me on [Tumblr](https://mooosicaldreamz.tumblr.com/).


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